


Twelve Days of Christmas

by ScarlettsLetters



Category: Doctor Strange (Comics), Marvel, Marvel (Comics)
Genre: Bondage, F/M, Light Dom/sub, Love, Magic, Multiple Orgasms, Orgasm Control, Romantic Soulmates, Rope Bondage, Sex Magic, Simultaneous Orgasm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-06 22:35:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 34,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12827562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScarlettsLetters/pseuds/ScarlettsLetters
Summary: On the second day of Christmas, my beloved gave to me: a wooden box and a fancy key. Wanda has plans for Stephen Strange.





	1. Chapter 1

_“In the bedroom, I left a key. For the second day this Christmas, it is your gift. It opens a box in the house. Small and wooden. When you want to claim the promise in the box, come for me and tell me.”_

Somewhere in the Sanctum, Wanda told him, she left a box. He gained a key, nothing more than the instructions spoken in a snowy cabin.

True to her word, she left a key in the bedroom nested among his cufflinks and tie clips. Where enamel or polished stones and metals glitter, it stands out as a plain relic unworthy of his time. No more than two inches long, the metal chit is heavy, possibly brass. Deep, oddly straight teeth are irregular enough to be handmade, rather than machined, so it’s probably quite old. Not meant for a modern lock with a simple steel key, then, but not absolutely ancient.

A red ribbon expertly braided and twisted into a tiny silk rope slips through a hole in the terminal end. Penned in her delicate handwriting: _Culhwch the Faithful_.

Silvery knotwork shifts across the surface, giving a somewhat Celtic influence. Not surprising; the Celts and the Roma have long been entangled.

That delightful ribbon in its vermillion hue makes a perfect anchor for nonchalantly swinging the key around the end of one finger rather dexterously for the scarring presented on his skin. It hadn’t taken him long to locate the chit; after all, the instructions were clear regarding its location and it didn’t exactly hide amidst his other items. One of these things is not like the other…

The Sorcerer in daywear leans against the doorframe of the master bedroom that separates sleep from Mystic study and stares across the room at nothing. His expression is distant, steel-blue eyes half-hidden; clearly, he’s within his mind rather than the world proper.

No signature of magic to track on the box. He started there first and was half-heartedly dismayed to find no linking thread between brass key and another location in the Sanctum. As if his Beloved were to let him have the prize that easily. She knows him too well. Any sort of connection was either summarily and thoroughly erased or didn’t exist in the first place. Even her fingerprints seem to be scoured away, physical and aural alike.

“Hmm…” The low baritone hum escapes him through his nose and he catches the key on the up-spin in his hand to observe it. Nothing new comes to him in the moment and he looks beyond it across the relic collection. Nothing is out of place there; Strange would know it immediately, with all the irritating intensity of its caretaker. The edge of the tag with the delicately-scrawled name pokes and he spreads it flat across his palm to read it once more.

 _Culhwych the Faithful_. “Col...coal?” He must dig through his memory for the linguistics of the island nations of Wales, Ireland, Scotland. “Coal...lack. Coal-lahk. Loch. Lock?” He frowns down at the name. “Coal-lock. Culock. Clock? I don’t have any clocks with locks on them,” the man mutters. Still, he shrugs and strides across the Loft towards the stairs. There is a grandfather clock downstairs, in the shop. A small box could hide there. However - no dice. Nothing behind the glass paneling that runs down its center save for the mechanical bits and the pendulum. “Dammit.” At least she’s not around to watch him fail at this first attempt. He tappity-taps his fingertips against the side of the clock in rapid, hollow sounds as he reads the name again. “Cuhl-lock. Clock...er, gods below. Lock, what is locked up around here? She wouldn’t go in the basement…”

No sane person would. It’s locked for a reason and everyone in the Sanctum has been thoroughly warned not to trifle with said barrier.

“Maybe a metaphorical stance… Unlocking…” His meanderings take him out into the foyer and he eyes the stained-glass window of Agamotto. It stares back, certainly not giving away anything or granting any sort of hint. “Unlocking...knowledge. The library?” His weak laugh echoes back to him. “There’s so many places for a box there…” Still, he makes his way to the library and begins looking.

An hour later and no such luck. Not a single book out of place, not even pulled out a sneaky half-inch in which to hide a thin, flat box behind. He’s been over every shelf, behind every nook he can remember, through all the drawers of his desk, even taking a moment to crane his neck to see the shadowy corners of the topmost roofing of the shelves. Nothing but a little dust, no fingerprints disturbing that either.

He stands in the middle of it all, frowning thunderously at the tag on the key. “Cuhl-lock. Clock. But it’s not a clock, it could be a lock and it unlocks a _box_ that I can’t _find_ at the moment.” A long sigh and rubbing at one temple as he holds up the paper to the ambient light of the room. No invisible ink or erasure marks. He tosses the key and catches it, looking back towards the hallway. “Clever hellcat…” It’s a soft grumble, quiet acknowledgment that she’s got him stumped, if only for a bit.

Into the library swishes the crimson Cloak, unbidden and clearly searching for him. The Sorcerer watches the garment approach and hover before him. It undulates in place, shoulders dipping and collars flipping as if attempting to communicate.

“I...didn’t summon you,” he says in bemused confusion. “And I’m not in the mood for charades, okay?” It shifts directly in front of him when he tries to pass by. Strange gives it a gimlet glare before attempting the other direction. Nope, swish, block. The relic is too fast; it mirrors each of his dodges until he lets out a growl and points at it with the key. “I am in the middle of something important and I have no time for games with an animate cloak!” The word rings in the silence and he mouths it, drawing back suddenly. “Cuh-loak. Cloak.” He reads the title on the tag again, this time with the new pronunciation. “Cloak the Faithful.” His gaze shifts up to the crimson relic and his jaw drops open slightly as he sees the near-perfect color match between it and the ribbon anchoring the key. “No. No, you’re not in collusion with _her_?! Hey, no, NO, GET BACK HERE!” He takes off at a sprint as the cheeky thing whisks out of the library. At a dead run, he follows it down the open-sided hallway, gripping at the decorative post-top at the corner to swing himself around and not bounce off the wall. “I command you to get back here right now!” It cheats -- over the edge of the railing and up, back into the Loft. Strange leans out to glare up at where it disappeared, panting. “We will talk! Just wait until I get up there!”

He pounds up the stairs into the Loft and spots the garment instantly over by its stand. Not like it could hide anyways; it sticks out like fresh blood on cream carpet, its hues sanguine in the odd lighting of the expansive room. Strange points now with a finger as he walks over, pinning the relic in place with the willful gesture and sharp look. “You chose me. Remember this. What are you, no -- stop it -- ugh, really...fine…” It has alit upon his shoulders and now patpats at his cheeks, stroking them in friendly reminder that it is, of course, his firstly. Trying not to flinch at the ticklish touching, Strange goes from glowering to grinning in fiendish delight. Then he laughs, looking from key to stand and covering his eyes.

On the stand. The Cloak’s stand. Right next to the master bedroom door, where he leaned when first considering his starting point to search.

“Oh gods below, you...you…” He’s impressed, dammit. Clever riddle, clever. Even the Cloak seems to give an extra shifting of delight which makes him nearly lose his balance and glare at one collar before he approaches this box.

A gift, a present, hides in plain sight by melding in, turned on end rather than lengthwise upon its base. This apparently causes no damage to the locked coffer, though it might be considered an atrocious use of a fine art piece. For the contoured lid and bas-relief sides are individual pieces of exquisite craftsmanship, the height of a carver’s art, painstaking renditions of a procession or a feast laid out in the loveliest depths of detail. Together? A masterpiece.

Men and women gather in a festive celebration of some sort, dispensing justice in one corner, romancing one another in the next. Warriors and maidens, bards and courtiers all gather. Or perhaps they’re just a medieval party of sorcerers. One expert around here might know.

Buffed white wood aged, gently, to an apricot glow maintains some prospect of metallic framing since removed. Not the lock, however, concealed behind a removable wooden panel of a sort. Now how to lift that panel is another matter entirely, albeit easier than crawling around on hands and knees in search of a damnable box under every bed, couch, and seat in the whole Sanctum.

Its contents must be well couched within a nest of fabric or compartments; there’s a definitive heft there, notwithstanding the exquisite wood capsule. No doubt lifting it will produce a very faint melody, swishing about, and that smug Cloak probably has _every_ idea of what elements are in play thanks to the fiendish witch in collusion with it.

Never mind she left a little red bow in Cloak’s colours on the stand, though it probably knocked over its present in the rush to go be a scarf on a chilly December morn. Sorcerer about town, fear to wear a bow! (Image: [Http://www.tinyurl.com/jz7xjw8](http://www.tinyurl.com/jz7xjw8))

No wonder he missed it then. Turning it on its smaller side absolutely enabled it to blend in. He lifts the box carefully from its placement and pauses, coffer in hand, to tilt his head and listen. Music, something familiar that he can’t quite put a finger on, though he can wrap his grip a bit more firmly about the object within them. It’s been the center point of too much creative human effort to be dropped and succumb to gravity. Inasmuch as he does file the object away as simple ‘box’ in his head, it would be a shame to pop the seams on the wood and leave the scenes fractured on the Loft floor. He stoops to grab the bow and gives it a small smile before turning to walk towards the nearest clear space on a nearby table.

The small casket, bas relief and all, is turned every which way to single out the point at which to insert said bronze key with Cloak-colored braiding. Centrally located on what appears to be the front panel is a thinner straw-shaded square of wood framed by another of the shapes in a darker apricot-cream. Maybe this...this hides the keyhole? Strange kneels to put himself eye-level with the portion of the box and squints. It seems delicate. Probably a good idea not to use too much force.

The edge of his fingernail can slip into one of the vertical separations between squares and nothing wider. She’d laugh, she would, as he visibly bites at his tongue to leave the tip sticking out; he never made this face during surgeries, too much the seriously Supreme neurosurgeon. Maybe he cheats a bit too, whispering a Word to induce the separation process. The wisp of magic travels down his arm, through his digit, and along with the counter-levering of his nail, he’s able to pop the little panel loose. It lands on the table with a barely-audible clatter.

Key, inserted into keyhole, a test to check for rotational direction as well as oiled tumblers, and he twists it to unlock the box.

_Click? Chime? Party popper of confetti?_

He stands and wiggles his fingers before carefully lifting the lid to reveal…

Apricot wood slips out of its housing, kept in place by a tight seamless fit and the very faintest tension capturing the upper right corner. Once sprung free, the cover reveals a small, irregular keyhole shaped something like a chef’s hat. The key proves fiddly to slide in, but the teeth hit the right tumblers and snap open by turning to the left, rather than anticipated right. Tension flits over the midway point, and when it comes unlocked, the lid lifts easily.

Interior hinges squeak a little, muffled by the cutting within, a hardened cocoon of shaped cardboard further sheltered by layers of thin foam below and velvet above. The central pocket holds a cut crystal vial lengthwise. Not clear, this, but a deep red of sunlight striking a garden of flowering tea roses, the stylized capped ends awash in the tight knotwork that itself hearkens to the ribbon he received with the key.

(Image: <http://tinyurl.com/hefbs5d>)

Being no longer than his middle finger, the vial’s contents are clearly liquid and the source of that ephemeral sound. Muffled, it might have sounded like wind or sand, but now clearly revealed.

More distinct, the bed of velvet is awash in petals: below the shaped holder for the vial, they are a mixed arrangement of the softest, rich shell pink bordering on hotter shades towards the core. Each is fresh as the moment it was picked at the height of June, fragrant in a gentle cloud, though easily bruised to reveal a trace of rose oil. Mixed among them are a lush scarlet array, these the mature red expected when someone tends to imagine ‘rose’ in the mind. It may be as sweet by any other name, but the collective imagination of western society thinks of that precise shade and endlessly replicates it: sports cars, high heels, lipstick, logos and so on.

Lift the vial, and there lies the familiar source of a scent or sight known to him: a caged spheroid on a chain attached to a keychain ring in metal, pierced to reveal the black roses found only in one spot on Earth. They tumble end over end, a goodly measure, and there might be some way to pull apart the sphere the way a person splits a tea ball into two hemispheres. But in that heady rush from the threefold layering, everything is fairly distinct: the sweetness, the deeper honey of the classic rose, the breathy, dreaming oils of the last.

A slight exhale passes as he leaves his touch on the outer edges of the box lid and observes the contents. The scent of roses is a slap in the face with a velvet glove; he wonders if he could literally taste it if he licked his lips.

The petals beneath the mysterious vial are incredibly soft as he scoops up the glass container. He narrows his eyes at it, attempting to figure out the liquid contents of it as he tilts it back and forth, holds it up to the light. One side seems to be more viscous, the other flowing freely. Both might be clear, or perhaps ruddy; either way, the coloration of the glass hides this. The sounds emitting from it don’t seem to change much even as he handles the object with mild irreverence, even going so far as to give it a gentle toss and catch to ascertain weight. Waves. Maybe it’s waves, shushing on a pebbled beach. Or a river? Moving water, he decides, no matter the manner of it. Moving water, but also something else more ephemeral and nearly beyond description. Maybe the best manner is a synesthete’s hearing light -- putting the sparkle of reflected summer sunshine to paper.

Next to come out is the silver hollowed orb with bottom hemisphere punctured in organized rows of holes that leak the attar of black roses, her favored perfume. It swings, a pendulum near hypnotic in sight and scent alike, and Strange slowly sighs once more, a smile curling his lips.

Find her to claim the promise. The last step of all. Now where is she… Not difficult at all, as easy as breathing and feeling the hairs rise on the back of his neck at the swirling miasma of rose around him, to access the pentacle’s connection. No doubt she feels the spark of the spell flick to life, even if he remains silent but for the impression of that shrewd interest that might make most squirm for its keen edge. Not the Witch. For her, it’s softened by endearment and by inquisitiveness.

Ah, the...kitchen -- and nonce, down he’ll go, but only after carefully closing off the cochineal lining with its carpeting of florid petals in blush and flush alike. The box is left on the table.

The Cloak? It deigns to accompany him and doesn’t mind its master’s grumbling as the man clatters down the steps to exit the Loft. Take a left towards the curvature of hallway towards the grand staircase? Nope. With a grunt, he places both vial and length of silver chain into one hand while using the other to vault _over_ the railing. Caught by the parachuting of the enchanted garment, he lands gracefully on the foyer floor, dress shoes echoing in a quick tump-tump of impact.

The good Doctor finds his Beloved in said room at the small kitchen table. He pauses in the doorway, content to observe rather than interact immediately. Oranges. Even as the sparkling scent of the freshly-peeled rinds reaches him, he spots the fruit along with her other favorite: honeycomb. This secondary sight brings a deeply-satisfied expression to his face -- pure, undiluted gratification -- that he quickly softens as he clears his throat.

“I don’t know how you managed to get the Cloak to play along, but...well done.” He grants her a fencer’s nod and knowing smirk; he’s not shaking his finger at her outright. An outstretched hand offers up the spoils of his search to the fluorescent light of the kitchen. “Your claimant has arrived.”

The kitchen may be larger than necessary for the occupants of the house, but one definitely requires fairly regular sustenance. A bowl of fruit lies before her, and a paper towel holds the remains of several orange rinds. Every last one she has peeled in a continuous spiral or a Mandelbrot splotch, leaving no pieces broken off.

A segment of satsuma passes her lips, the sweet-tart sting on her tongue a welcome addition. Citrus sings upon the air, cutting clean through the attar of roses, a brightening and enlivening scent to whisk the mind away from a mid-spring idyll in a garden.

Perched upon her chair, she plucks one of those small chunks of golden foam from under an orange and neatly presses it to her lips. Such a treasured comb never lasts long, reduced by time and moisture to mere memory. But she can savour the suspended industry of pollinators in the floral sweetness, licking the dust with a dash of her padded tips over her mouth.

Strange thus has her in one of those rare moments where she actually stands at the watering hole. Like many an animal in such conditions, Wanda trends a little skittish.

A glance skims over his recovered items, a nod acknowledged. Success in the game, though ‘tis but the opening act. Does he know it?

“What to give the man with everything for Christmas? I wonder at this puzzle put before me. Every prize,” the witch ruminates on this, one of life’s great mysteries. “You have all you might need. You have done so much. If you want it, what stops you from having it?”

Another segment of the half-eaten satsuma is pulled away, a mandarin crescent moon mirroring the curve of her mouth before she bites it neatly in two and swallows.

She continues, “Then an idea dawned. I _can_ give you something, a new experience. What no one else has done: that is a worthy present.“ Smug? Undoubtedly. Excited, possibly, and a touch nervous, verily. “Two sides to every gift, they say. You receive, and you give. Drink the water to experience something new. Use the oil to do something no one has done.“

He’s taken aback and actually mildly embarrassed at the implications that, basically, he’s impossible to shop for. Still, Strange listens and her edict in regard to the dual chambers within the vial earns the object a contemplative look. 

Walking further into the kitchen leads him to a chair across from her and he settles in. The tea ball filled with darkest petals is set on the table, its chain curling up around it to keep the orb from rolling further. The red-glass bottle is held up to the artificial light and observed. Decisions, decisions…

“And knowing you as well as I do,” he speaks in an amused baritone, “you aren’t going to tell me what this experience is or what this thing is that no one has done. It’s sounding like I _can’t_ have my cake and eat it too.” A teasing click of his tongue as he meets her eyes across the short distance. “Shame.”

Wanda does the Sorcerer Supreme the honour of letting him work out aloud his thoughts. The enemy of all good ideas is interruption. She instead separates segments of the orange into individual shards, arranging them in a little flower. Then it’s on to the next small fruit, peeling it in the same fashion: pierce the soft spot at the bottom with her nail, ease the thin rind back, and then remove in a single go.

The result actually looks akin to an elephant, great flappy ears and a long curling trunk from point of impact. Mischief glitters in those honey-brown eyes, trained as they are upon her work. A few bits of the white string are peeled off the orange, and she surveys her work with a critical eye.

Which is to say, the orange, not the gift.

“Did you never wonder the meaning of the petals?” A tricolour of them. She lets Strange savour that thought for a moment, and puts down the mandarin to address him properly, elbow on the table in a shocking departure from good manners.

“I believe you proved already you can. I seem to remember that much, though not very much else. The windows being very bright, perhaps.” Her choice to pick up a fruit just then is purely anticipatory, and she nibbles up the curve of the slice without breaking its surface, mostly testing for a weak point. Still, the tart taste earns a smile if very brief.

She muses, then says, “The water follows a path. I will guide you, I know the way. The oil makes a path more comfortable, and that's for the darkest rose you have not picked, the garden you haven’t strayed into. They are not unrelated, but I... ” She is not blushing, but her slightly glazed tawny eyes are squarely on the vial. Not his face. The vial.

“The thing I can give no one else has or can have. One of many ways of having that. So yes.” The orange she licks once and then bites into. No babbling here, nope.

The window was fairly bright, this is true, he concedes mentally as he watches her nibble on the little slice of orange with laughter restrained but for the twinkle in his steel-blue eyes. The Cloak gives a little shift, perhaps anticipating some call to action, but is instead commanded to stillness once more by intent mental settling of metaphorical hand to its silken being. Hush, not now, he needs to listen.

The departure from her normal terse cadence is noted and especially so the lingering interest she gives the vial sitting across his palm. A downward angle of a tilt rolls it into his fingers and he holds it up once more, eyeing her as if to undress her unspoken intentions.

“So... drink the water? Use it as part of a ritual? Flick it at you while you sit there and enjoy your fruit and your secrets?” He smirks, tilting the bottle back and forth, if only to appreciate the shift in mysterious liquid and the slight emphasis it gives to the ambient sound of surf. He won’t mention aloud how the idea of a darkest garden makes his neck tingle.

He truly insists on putting her in the proverbial hot seat, does he? Clearly Strange shares more in common with the younger twins than he cares to admit or know.

Taking her sweet time by putting another slice of orange into her mouth, Wanda gives little reaction for how to use the contents of the vial. The water is not a substantial amount, certainly less than a solid mouthful. He’s probably consumed more castor oil at the hands of a very diligent parent or nurse.

“Take the lid off and drink it. The water is very pure. Do not try to drive, you may not be prepared for how light and fresh you feel. The first taste is intense.” Maybe there’s a joke here about aqua vitae and whiskey. Waters of life and all that.

The feint works well enough, and she licks a droplet of orange juice from her fingertip. “You plucked the red rose. Then you had the pink rose. You have not tried the black, though. It is an invitation.”

Strange considers the smooth-flowing contents of one side of the vial as he tips it vertically. Certainly, not much in there at all, less than a proper shot of whiskey. The pondering as to whether it not water, but vodka, crosses his mind as he rolls the bottle within his fingers in opposing directions.

“Drink it right now? Or is there a reason I should wait, since it’s apparently so potent?” His expression gains a shadow of suspicion. “Is this some potion you’ve concocted? I’d rather not drink anything without knowing what is first. It’s not that I don’t trust you, honestly, it’s...a lesson hard-learned.”

Story there without a doubt, especially in how he even gets a bit sheepish-looking. If she guesses it has something to do with medical schooling, she wouldn’t be too far off the dot.

“One thing at a time though,” he adds in regard to said invitation. There’s first the puzzle of the meaning of the water and this need for her to take his hand on some sort of journey. “You mentioned needing to guide me. You’re saying that this will do what...make me dizzy? It’s some sort of hallucinogen?”

“Water in the city is impure,” explains the witch, her tone soft and thoughtful while she finishes wrapping up the paper towel around her orange peels. A pinch of a corner to another makes a suitable holder for her to toss it out, and if there is any sort of compost bin or slop pail, in go the orange bits. “Even water from rivers and streams has impurity. The minerals or the dirt, the dreams of earth, the taste of sky and of course people. You drink the water and drink the same as Cleopatra or Peter the Great. But pure? No.”

She swings her foot under the chair, measuring all Strange’s reactions for he is a book. Perhaps open, but he is also a very, very long series of encyclopedias, and she is only on A-Al, which is a very long volume in its own right. So much to learn, and time is not her friend or ally in this business.

Puzzling over hallucinogen, she shakes her head. “No, it is not any drug or potion. It is _pure_ water, the mother of all water. If water could have a dream of what it wants to be, that holds the dream. You have not tasted something like it, I think, and so the taste, the sensation of it on your tongue and lips, the sound… It is an experience that will be very strong. You might feel bubbles on your tongue, as it comes from a spring, and I know it stays cold and fresh for a while outside of the spring.”

He wants answers, he has them, with one more supplied while she looks down at the tabletop. “I guide you because you have not been to the island, and I know the wandering path to it. You do not wish to poke about and end up in the wrong spot?”

 

Oh no. Oh, she didn’t -- the mother of all lures for the good Doctor. He tilts his head slightly and bites the inside of his curving lips against a light riposte. End up in the wrong spot? Still...he studies her only a moment longer before shifting his attention to the silver cap turned betwixt fingers that tremble ever so slightly.

“You’re telling me that this is Water of Life…? Aqua Vitae? The same thing quested after by so many explorers?” He sets the top on the table and sniffs at the vial carefully. It smells...different, yes, but maybe that’s from the fact that the vial itself sat in an immersion of freshest rose petals; the floral scent lingers about his fingers as well, dulling his ability with its sweetness. “Bubbles and cold don’t sound so terrible.”

_Dare accepted._

The mouthful of water is summarily tossed back and coats the inside of his cheeks. The Sorcerer swallows carefully, smacks his lips, and then is subject to the most singular set of sensations. Not your normal water indeed!

She did. Take that, Sorcerer, there is finally a reason for her to run over the world and beyond in search of something worthy of his attention. The vial is easily unscrewed and when he bothers to do so, a gasp of air comes bubbling out as though it, too, is steeped in additional moisture and vapor by sheer proximity to a liquid that in all respects appears the way water should.

The Platonic ideal of water, anyways.

His incredulous response earns the slightest of smiles, razor thin, absent of anything to be designated a true answer. Let it stand on its own virtues and merits, or not at all.

The water has no scent save its own, which resonates of the pristine state of a glacier gone liquid. Let that be the synesthete’s gift upon him, because the moment Strange sets the glass to his lips, the liquid tumbles out.

And there is a great deal more in volume than a tablespoon or so that appears to be inside the ornate red crystal container. The lush bouquet comes alive upon his tongue as a rush of fizz and a kiss of arctic ice, an initial impact that chills away any impression that might have lingered. The brain takes a few moments to parse what it can taste: clean, blue, A minor, the dizzy green-jade flood off a peak, the soaring cotton hexagon polar clouds that scream at a thousand miles an hour, the rising sun reflected in a dewdrop that sizzles with colourless wonder. It’s the song of a diamond imagined by a dolly varden, the sonnet sung by a salmon to the waterfall. An icicle crispness gives way to something nurturing and velvet, percolating through every niche and crevice of his mouth to distill a moment into a _taste_.

A touch of pearl on the inside, the satin smooth finish of nacreous shell plays over his ears, and the distinct impression of sunlight shattered into countless sparkles on a rippled silk pool perfumes his breath. 

Bubbles would imply something involving air, whereas this is stranger, a liquidity in him removed of all its base substances. Purified and purified again by a shot that seems to course lower and deeper through his digestive tract, the coruscating flood answers the tug of the moon and the path of least resistance.

  
Strange might realize his feet are leaving the ground. Enough to put him on the tips of his toes, but the weightlessness is completely comfortable, almost natural. He might imagine a hundred wet fruits before setting on what it tastes like: Antarctica and peaches dipped in honey made from unicorn giggles. Or something equally improbable.

The world does look more nuanced as though the spectrum of visible light was suddenly stretched by another mile from its current minor, compressed wavelengths. Not even Crayola has this many names for purple.

All those sensations and more play street hockey with his mind until he’s left deliciously muddled. Confused? Absolutely, but in the best of ways. Feverish? With _life_. He blinks a few times, testing for a threshold of touch between tongue and lips and finding it hard to locate. Numbed? Yes, but through sensory _overload_.

Across from him, Wanda glows. To his sight, she is hyper-clear and winks like living gemstones. Even the Cloak is amused by it all; after all, its master might be leaving his seat counter to gravity’s pull -- and all without its assistance? It brushes at his cheeks once or twice with cheeky collars.

He can formulate a response, but only after coughing once and it’s sure as hell as brain-numbed as it sounds:

“Wow.”

The vial has been placed back on the table at one point or another and he blinks at it too, amazed at how _red_ it is. He feels...he feels like he could take on the world right now. Is his soul on fire within his centering? Is his magic bleeding from his pores? _He_ feels incandescent!

Everything in his posture and expression, down to the way he needs to be touching the tabletop with splayed palms and the width of his pupils, tells of the delicious high. The Sorcerer tries for speech again and succeeds a bit more this time.

“Now what?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Doctor Strange figures out the first part of his Christmas gift. Now that he's got the key to open the lock, he decides to make good on his claim.

Were fair Doctor Strange to espy his own aura, he might grow giddy just staring at the auroral flares and nebulous distance of it, rendered in shades impossible for the typical human to even envision, let alone perceive with their unassisted eyes. Yet his is an unstifled spectrum of blues tendered in ways that make the night sky a poor substitute for the changing tonal gradient surrounding him.

Wanda manages to stifle a smile at this behaviour, though she does not move too quickly. Neither does she pull attention to the bowl of oranges whose super-heated mandarin hue might just burn out the retinas were they not the very embodiment of all that is juicy, lush, and lively about the citrus family. Each is a bomb of potential to the heightened synesthesia currently at play.

“You see. Bad to drive, the tail lights are very compelling when the first taste happens. I will say this can substitute for any liquid in a spell. Very potent magic,” she notes in a mildly academic manner, which suggests a lesson beaten into her head at some point.

Then allowing the Sorcerer Supreme to languish no longer, she extends her hand to him while he embraces the universe in another spectrum beyond the one he knows, like he put on a proper pair of glasses and fine-tuned the blurry effect at the edges. “We can leave now or later. Your choice. I am happy to take you to the island, and it will be safe. None would dare threaten us there, not under its guardians’ watch.”

Her speech is being processed as if spoken in air deprived of Earthly constraints. Mezzo-soprano? Yes, but it wavers and harmonizes upon itself until he isn’t quite sure if she’s singing or not. Hence the mildly-confused expression, even as she offers a hand that blurs towards him and hovers in the air, golden and haloed by buttercream light.

Strange reaches back, his own motions abnormally smoothed by the influence of the Aqua Vitae and takes the burning brand. A little inhale of how she really does feel like embers kept shy of pain-inducing and he swallows as her pupils threaten to drown him in their depths.

“Very potent,” he echoes with a laugh. So lightweight! He feels like he could literally float away. Her grip keeps him grounded, even when his inner ears are exclaiming egads, gravity! Where is it?! “We...we can leave now. Might as well?” His is the spoken cadence of the dreamer, lead on by the most beautiful of all.

How can he be so damn charming and adorable in the same moment? Still virile and potent as a magician, yet so unearthly cuddly like a baby ocelot, Strange is testing all of Wanda’s resolve not to pinch his collar and conspire with the Cloak to allow for additional cheek pats.

Grounded is a peculiar thing, since he is almost lighter than air, despite being up one shot of aqua vitae. His pupils burn the same bright hue they always do under the Sight, but she pauses for a moment and points towards the Windows. “You should see how wonderful the world here looks, before I take you there. Have a moment to be aware of all that you view and guard.”

It might also be necessary that she does not completely overwhelm him by anything untoward, like tightening her coat or fetching a pair of proper gloves, which takes no time at all. With the cloak in all its sanguine wonder at the ready, surely the languishing weight of its friendly embrace will set the poor man to utter and total paroxysms of sensate glee.

And remember, she is a sensate through and through. Who better to understand his predicament and relish its effects? With a gentle tug on his hand, she raises his scarred and gnarled knuckles reverently to her lips and allows an abstract drift of her lips across those peaks in a brief kiss. Let’s see how quicksilver fire and moonlight shot through his nerves feels like, and it ought to be stated, the tremors that normally afflict him might feel like the rise and fall of the sea, calming in their way.

“We would be better to go outside. I am going to open the way from the Witch Road.” Another light kiss. “Happy Christmas, <>.”

“Err, the win--” Words are hard when your world suddenly narrows to the way a pulsar explodes through your veins. Forget the shaking of damaged nerves and how he might perceive those; his entire body moves to the swells of the kiss bestowed to his scar-purled joints. The shifting of the Cloak to catch him before he falls from his chair is enough to induce the softest groan from him. Slosh, his inner ear does a complete flip and rights itself by the time he, in turn, is righted once more, his grip on Wanda’s hand tighter still. The garment is so very soft against his skin, it feels nearly like clouds incarnate in passing.

Round two with that second kiss and he can’t help the inhalation. This goddess of aurum and carmine continues to rock his boat and he can do nothing but go along with the ride.

“Merry Christmas,” he manages, swaying still in his seat. If this is how he reacts to the ghosting of a kiss, how is he expected to avoid stumbling backwards and falling to his behind at the revelation of the world outside of the Sanctum? “Lead on, beloved.” Another laugh, as airy as his bones.

The waters are forgiving, for the overwhelming sense will retreat, little by little, to a reasonably comfortable awareness instead of one intoxicated. That may come sooner than Strange reckons. But first he must brave the storm, and endure flitting about like a will-o-wisp.

Taken by the hand, he is led to the steps and down them to the front door, hopefully aided by the Cloak. If not, he weighs next to nothing and she effortlessly guides him with what support she can offer. It helps the water is lighter than air, and he too assumes some of those qualities, ephemeral as his corporeal form can be.

“Happy Christmas, Trishul.” His hellcat has her claws lightly hooked into his sleeve, and they eventually go forth through the wards into Bleecker Street, awash in the chill freezer burn of the winter. Pedestrians hurry along. No one wants to be caught in the cold, not at all. He won’t have far to go, around the side of the building where the nearest small garden forms a triangle large enough for them both, though it’s a dormant pie slice.

Wanda wraps her arms around her sorcerer and pulls him close. She smells of the woods and the precious spices that erupt around her, pulsating hints of light filtering through the leaves that aren’t there. Stippled shadows fall upon them and the earth lends a hint of warmth as she braids the energy sluggishly moving through the soil to the inevitable birthright of her tradition. They share many: this, however, is hers.

The Witch Road yawns open as a portal opens around them, a swirl of colour and shadows transitioning into a wall of trees in grandiose size and scale. Plants grow in abundance around them, green licks of foliage tumbling around them in iridescent spirals of gemstone intensity. Emerald leaves meet tender pearl cream variegated petals and needles of a dusty cobalt. The trunks sweep back in ranks to a forest as primeval as it is beautiful, abstractions of shadow painted into majestic creatures that might not be wholly human. The fae surrounded by an envelope of living light could well be pixies, though they hang back.

In this light, the witch reveals herself as what she is, sheathed in a scarlet robe off her shoulders and a bright, glittering coronet of bent starlight twinkling off her hair as it stitches irregularly back and forth. That would normally be red as the mantle she wears, but instead, it is amaranthine and studded by tiny twinkling motes.

They have little distance to travel and she does not speak as she gathers Strange with her. The path is spongy and light, frosted in a cookie dusting of snow. Yet where they go, light varies, and shadows gather in bars, spilling back from the glow emanating from him more than her, for even here the Vishanti are owed their due. Mostly.

Another hole in the trees opens, an oval cast in a warm turquoise sheen. She takes them that way, and the tunnel of trees grows decidedly milder as meadow flowers bloom and wild roses nod heavily upon bushes, the luster of their glassy leaves a wonder unto itself.

That Cloak needs to be given a lot more credit. So much primary movement begins at the torso and with flighty accents to mark its firm control at his collarbones, the Witch is aided in keeping the thoroughly-intoxicated Doctor at her side and from stumbling into the street.

He can barely feet the pressure of his weight against the cold pavement, though that is quite the novel sensation with the swish of Aqua Vitae running through his system. The crisp air is soft somehow, like the deflected edges of frosty knives that leave goosebumps in its wake. He shivers, dressed only in the button-down and pants, and watches his exhalation swirl in the air, kissing-cousin to the wards about the Sanctum. Are the spells not a child of his own Words breathed into still spaces? His heart resounds in his ears with its primal rhythm in drum-beats that fight off the encroaching pale light that only winter can provide. The iciest of seasons attempts to steal away what heat reaches his fingers and toes.

A bit of a drunken wobble and he needs must find his feet as they approach the green patch. He slung his arm across her shoulders at one point, probably looking quite the lush with his glazed eyes and pinked cheeks. If Karl could see him now...oh dear. It’s hard still to process every mix-and-match sensation bombarding his cortex and far easier to let most of it blow past him like the lung-freezing puffs of wind. Being pulled close poses no issues. It merely wraps him in gauzy streamers of her perfume and the sudden double-vision of filtered sunlight in a shade far warmer and greener than anything he’s ever seen.

Green. Even the air tastes green. Strange looks around him, mouth hanging blatantly open, as he takes in the sheer size of the trees. All in thousands of hues of brown, painted with spatters of moss and lichen, crackled with age and growth, crowned in verdigris. He blinks a few times, smacking his lips at the loam that lingers in each breath, and when he glances over to see her in her robes of cherry’s luscious hues, it draws yet another gasp from him. No hyperborean claws dig into his chest, only ivy vines that thread further into his psyche. She is a rufescent miracle; his heart does a dance in his chest that leaves him feeling more buoyant still. Her crown is completely applicable, Consort to the Sorcerer Supreme. His gaze shifts to the stippling of snow, at odds with the thickness of the boughs above him, and he watches one of the secretive lights flick out of sight with a sense of suspicion many, many times removed from where he currently exists.

So interested in those phantasmal lights is he that it takes him a few delayed moments to process the serene reforming of the surroundings. Luminous frosted-lilac rings pupils that dilate further still as he watches the wildflowers reflect color in a sweep that he can’t completely fathom. Wholesomely fragrant, the air here, sweeter and ambrosial in floral notes: spring -- spring might smell like this, look like this, feel like this on his skin.

“Beloved, this is the Witch Road? It leads to…?” His voice remains hushed in a reverence to their surroundings that might make her smile in its sheer punch-drunk earnestness.

“The Witch Road leads all places,” she murmurs into his ear, giving Strange the answer he seeks with a dozen extra tones filling in the spaces around her honeyed accent. Slavic notes bounce off the sheer faces of the consonants and land in the dulcet valleys, smoothing out the ascent over a few linguistic hurdles unique to English. “We could travel many days in here safely. Its predators and denizens are different, but they do belong to the earth mother.”

Wanda’s fingers trail over the deep loam gloss of her hair, easing back a wavy tendril shot by a raspberry glaze on the underside of the tress with its propensity to curl slightly at the bottom. Tucking it back over her shoulder allows an unrestricted view of a redwood aglow in creamy flowers, each petal as large as a tea saucer, and the center plucked out in warm honeydew stamen that drift pollen down to the ground. The savory scent combines the fullness of a good meal with something a little like nail polish.

“Come. Not too far.” Their footfalls barely make a noise on the bracken gathered in a thick carpet, though it soon becomes a deeper cushion fed by countless small alpine flowers creeping over the ground. Whatever lies beneath might be under a lattice of roots and little spade-shaped leaves two meters thick, for all they know.

Redolent trickles of brine tease the pristine air that collectively sighs with the aspirating plants, and leaves a tinge of dreamy lapis blue and cyan, painted more towards Strange’s side of the path. Lupins push through the floral wall, aided by delphiniums standing proudly over the roses…

And the roses, in passing, turn to the shade of a night sky, stars caught upon their curling petals. Wicks of light dance along the closed buds, and even the thorns carry an iridescent quality more in line with bending starfire laced and scintillating through the atmosphere than a sharp organic point. He made her roses from starlight; these bushes, in turn, capture the heavens and root them to the earth in a spellbinding alchemy that is the very reflection of who and what they are.

Flickering bands of blue light radiate outwards from the portal, a hint of stormy seas revealed in the blazing steel waters chopped into tumbling waves and abbreviated troughs that heave and crash upon themselves.

Wanda raises a palm outwards and bites the inner corner of her lip hard enough to bleed. All has its cost, even Paradise. What stains her tongue and teeth is but a small amount of iron thin blood, and she summons up the words to match her will.

The incantation lingers in the air, a sonnet at once declarative of her intentions and familiar, addressing one known. “ _Sestra jutra, Vecernja Zvijezda! Crveni Vestica placa troskove. Otvorite vrata za ljubitelje_.”

Moments pass. Longer, til Strange may well doubt whether they are passing at all. His lightheadedness remains, but the underlying disassociation of senses might become more naturalized, still keyed up, but something his body knows how to filter effectively. Then a petal drops from the portal.

Ripples form, radiating through the oval confines until they strike the shore, and space bends around the central point. A vision takes shape on the other side, given clarity with the blued out screen finally dropping.

Deep sunset lies upon the world, not unlike a dimension blessed by Hoggoth. Yet here the pulchritude of sundown lies far closer to the hour when the last lamp is extinguished upon the horizon, and the nocturnal court assembles in all their starry, unvanquished splendour. Amethyst streaks the heavenly heights, melted through lilac towards the world’s rim. Sea sweeps off to the left upon their passage through, the backbone of a populated isle lifting to the right and forward. Two great manmade objects present themselves, architecturally separated from the behemoth trees of the Witch Road by texture and composition: porphyry, the blood purple of emperors, and the tapering column. Capped by a rough, stepped square, each supports a star of its own, surrounded by an envelope of superhot gas wide upon the spectrum.

Four such pillars enclose a roughly square space, capped by an onion dome barely visible to the naked eye. Its presence only becomes known against the night sky: the stars do not present themselves there, and the glancing low angle of the vanished sun tints the lowest ruddy hue upon its aureate surface. What treasury be robbed to conjure the wealth in marble and alabaster or lapis used to capture every shadow in stark relief, truly no empire could carry on.

The sweep of the promontory leads to foaming waters that lap at some nearby shore, though the view is overcome by the abundance of those starry flowers and stranger ones besides, guided to clamber over silvery trellises that look incapable of supporting a Luna moth, much less a full-grown plant with tightly budded flowers and a full thicket of leaves that suspiciously might appear made of nephrite, jade, and aventurine.

Those gardens enfold the Pillars of Dusk to varying heights and degrees, not fully blocking out sight of the walled city further into the isle’s heart, yet enforcing a sense of distance and propriety. Think of them more as a hedge, screening some privacy and defining the natural borders of a secret garden or chapel available to the select few welcome here.

Other features might reveal themselves with time, but the night-blooming flora and abundance of delicate benches stand out, as they focus inward upon the cleared space with a modestly raised platform of a kind. Whether following a hillock of soil or deliberately raised is not clear. Somehow the earth lifts into a geometric form there, hexagonal crystals forming a path all the way up. Idle zephyrs affectionately tease at the vines forming veils that tumble between the pillars; they never touch, though, the four great foundation columns independent and electrified by a primordial power rooted in mystic and faith sources alike.

It’s fair to say the Sorcerer Supreme, with his Sight still up, is probably zapped many times by the strobing deific presences woven through the wards and essence of the place. Just as, say, another famous floating island lost to the sea most assuredly would be.

**_Buyan_**. The fabled roaming Isle of Wonders, the mother of all. So the Slavs say, anyways. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Witch and sorcerer find their way onto the mythical island of Buyan, sacred to the threefold goddesses of the night sky.

It seems that the blurring of all movements is beginning to fade. While her voice still lingers at his ears in dulcet timbres, his auditory processes clearly needing time to settle still from the wash of Aqua Vitae, it’s getting much easier to visually process the Path around him. It’s not that the hyper-coloring of the entire world lessens, more than he’s starting to organize mentally rather than simply react to subjection. 

The roses garner his attention as long as the fae-wisps did, until it takes the gently-insistent steering of the Witch to draw him onwards still. How did Nature manage to contain night in a petal and pull the stars from the skies above without consuming the plant itself in cold fire? They bloom not like blood-drops, but Nyx-drops, the goddess’s tears hanging upon them. Does his gifted rose hold a candle to these? He has time for a momentary swish of concern against the backdrop of his tranquil mind before the bitter emotion is swiped away by Vitae’s ebullient control. 

Portal met, pathway stymied (only briefly), Sorcerer attempt to discern the evocation’s base language (Eastern European, assuredly, Transian once more?), and then it seems they’ve arrived at the proposed end of her journey through the Witch Path. The clinging of the portal’s hypnotically-swirling power clings to him in the layering of Sight’s senses and he can’t help the little shudder and swallow when they pass through it. If cobwebs could taste like ozone and feel like granules of kinetic sand, that would do it.

His mouth drops open once more, human awe magnified until all he can do is begin Sensory Organization Attempt 2.0. 

Wait, the plants are gems? Earth’s minerals have taken on floral architecture? When did the moon triplicate plus once again and gain the ability to near-blind him with radiance atop each column? Who captured the miniature suns? Blitzed -- the onslaught of the magnificent presences whose influences run bedrock-deep and knit indelibly into atomic aspect of this place -- they greet him whether he wishes it or not. Perhaps she can see those moments in his expressions. A slow flinch, little gritting of his teeth, near-shutting of his Mystically-lambent eyes, as his own powers unconsciously respond like-to-like, even if not on the same playing field without the direct intervention of the Vishanti. 

There’s the low shushing thunder of distant waves; then the grinding of tectonic plates where sound becomes bone-tickling vibrations beneath his feet (though likely not hers); followed by the air-welting whumps of gigantic wings. Dozens more smaller sensations, but these hit him forefront and leave him to need her presence beneath his slung arm.

“Wh -- what is this place?” Strange has a guess, but it’s all jumbled up in this cacophony between his ears.

Songs of night and day dance on the wind. The sun and moon hold court nearby. Beyond, wind and sea dance, but the winds knot in the compass rose directions with a far stronger presence than the ocean itself. Water dances around the meandering labyrinths of power, reliquaries shining ripe on silver and jade branches to Strange’s senses. 

Wanda gives the sorcerer long as he needs to gain his senses. The air here is entirely pure, same as the water he drank goes without parallel in the sullied world. Her arm curled around his waist helps to keep him somewhat rooted, though the merest thought might send him floating off a few inches clear of the ground itself. Should he desire to, she will not halt him from floating along. 

“In our lore,” she says, “the three Zoryas serve the sun. One, morning star, escorts the sun out in the dawn. Then, the evening star brings the sun back. Most elusive is the midnight star, Zorya Polunochnaya, who guides ends and beginnings.”

The words are spoken with a hushed reverence, yet it makes no difference. Warm breezes driven off the land play over them, carrying traces of spice and warm amber to play along the skin. These are toying, light touches of pure curiosity, stroking a line down the Cloak and skating off the slope of Strange’s nose and Wanda’s cheekbones. 

Then they flitter away, off to harass the trellis plants, and hide playfully in the corners of the clearing. It’s to that platform the brunette walks, either with or behind him. “The Pillars of Dusk.” A gesture of her hand indicates the whole of the space. “They stand to greet the Evening Star when she passes. We have until the breaking of day.”

Whatever else might afflict him as a remnant from the aqua vitae, it normalizes within a heartbeat of him reaching the platform, and the reason is not hard to see. On the other side of the slope, a neat crescent cut into the floor and down the opposite slope reveals a playful spring splashing about and feeding a rivulet that pours through a series of paint-pot grottos. These chained pools run circular and somewhat deep, strung together, pearls headed straight through the garden for another demesne on the island. Magic radiates through them all: the lifeblood of it, a quintessential thread common to all. Liquid mana. 

The witch runs her fingers over one of the Pillars, allowing the porphyry to abrade her palm ever so lightly. “The River of All Rivers, the mother, the wellspring, the fountainhead. She comes up here. I do not know if she starts here on Buyan, but there she is.” The implication presumably is that’s where his vial originated from. 

She steals off to a bench, which has all the argent delicacy of the trellis. It shouldn’t support her weight. Yet she captures a handful of the gossamer haze filtering through the square space -- it has no walls -- and presses it together with her hands, weaving and twisting almost at random, until it produces an adequately fluffed cloud to lie down on. 

She sprawls out on her back upon the buoyant, cushioning surface that absorbs her weight easily enough. “I need say this place is enchanted. Air and water.” Earth and fire. They are always in new configurations. A hand weaves a circle above her, dropped back to her breast. “A treasure chest of delights to be opened. Try to capture the starlight in your hand or twist the wind into a knot. You can.”

An indolent turn to her head leaves her luminous amber eyes directed upon Strange, a hedonistic and passionate flare burning in their hearts. “Here your gift begins. Come kiss me.”

Left to his own devices at the peak of the platform, the Sorcerer continues to take in his surroundings. Now no longer weighed down by his body’s attempt to handle the excruciatingly-vivid identification of every single sensory aspect around him, he feels merely...awake. Very awake. One-too-many-cups-of-coffee awake. 

He shifts in reaction to the extreme sense of life within his veins and finds that his weight is distributed differently than normal. Not an incredible shock to him, now that he’s not so very brain-numb, but still novel. The good Doctor runs a gamut of tests, even as he has half an ear on her explanations regarding the Spring of all Springs. Rising onto his toes, he finds that he can literally balance on-pointe, like a Russian ballerina, and slowly bends up one knee until the pose comes as naturally as breathing, from a history of long practice. Tai Chi’s Crane Spreading Wings meets the beginnings of Gathering Clouds and even as he hears her suggestion as to manipulating the elements around him to physical constructs, the blurring speed of his hands begins to influence the immediate space before him. The Masters talked about contemplating the collecting of mist between their palms as part of summoning magic; Strange finds the swirling miasma growing as he cajoles it with motion and will alike to form. 

The fluidity of his muscles is a high in and of itself, his smile of delight growing as the mist takes to some indeterminate weaponry utilized by the Shaolin monks of the high mountains. Too easy then to work through some basic series of moves. Star-wrought tieshan gain flaring edges as do the tips of his boots as he burns through some of the sparkling energy still coruscating through his body. Touches of kung-fu there, aspects of malla-yuddha here. Punch, punch, deflection, pause in lean limbed grace, deflection, kick, kick, highest whipping kick yet! Not a true black belt, by any means, but the students of the Ancient One are never left to depend entirely on their magic to wage war. The Mystical Arts merely adds the most dangerous nuance to their skill sets. 

All this hectic action is executed solely on the dais’s limited surface. The Cloak plays along good-naturedly, swirling and adding its own silky actions of unexpected defense or offense to its master’s dance. At one point, the garment detaches from his shoulders entirely, just as he commits to the last of the kicks, a high arcing blow clearly meant to crunch into an enemy’s ear and likely loosen teeth in the process. 

Funny how a minor shift in weight can affect the physics of a moving object. With a sound of shock, he finds the motion carrying him a bit farther into the turn than expected, the impetus of the action taking over, and he lands, but not gracefully, not at all! Backwards, wobbling, arm-waving stumble-shuffle back down the hexagonal crystalline steps with impacts that sound to his throbbing ears like forks against champagne glasses and by the time he’s found his balance at the bottom, the sounds hang in the air in a perfect minor chord. The Sorcerer gives the Cloak a mild reproachful look, to which is returned a literal shrug of the crimson shoulders. 

He holds up one hand, still enshrouded in the opalescent mist, and blows it away back to the room, returning it to its natural languid state. The action isn’t difficult; he’s barely out of breath. This place is...madness. Beautiful --

A glance over at the Witch as well as the inevitable locking of their eyes is enough to make him react in his normal manner of freezing up. However, here, in this place housing the Pillars of Dusk, with Aqua Vitae licking at every nerve and so close to its home fountain, it’s impossible to remain entirely still. 

Beautiful madness.

Every inch of him shivers at memories made nearly incarnate. It is no hallucination that there is a wildfire’s nebula within those pupils which absorb his resistance with as little struggle as a black hole’s draw on the universe around it. When did it become so very hard to breathe? He was just considering the opposite and now his mouth is doing its damnedest to go cotton-dry.

To her side he travels, with as much Sorcerous insouciance as possible, all the while fighting the insane urge to attempt to crawl out of his skin. No doubt his aura crackles with cerulean fulmination against storm-struck amaranthine to match the magnitude of Mystical glow in his irises. He considers the slick plumpness of those lips that might be sequestering a smile just out of sight, inhales deeply, and then commits to sealing them with a kiss.

Beautiful, beautiful madness.


	4. Chapter 4

No comment comes from the Witch whilst Sorcerer Supreme proves himself as curious as a month-old lion cub, gamboling around the savannah and batting the wild-maned lion king with an open paw. He successfully galumphs his way through the open space described by swirling, thorny canes and bobbing foliage that undulates to his path, rising and falling in relationship with his relative height. Bob too high and the leaves sweep along the rising, arched branches or stems. Flowers sway and flutter, still tightly wound as the copper fletched arc of the Cloak dances upon the seaborne breezes. In the warmer hours, the wind runs off the slopes of Buyan Island towards the waves lapping at placid, pearl-flecked shores; now, the effect reverses when the warmer waters relinquish their heat to the cooled land.

The first lanterns peek through the violaceous skies, pansy bruises deepening the arch of the heavens. There those initial sparks form strange shapes akin to the constellations they surely know, but none of the circumpolar patterns emerge to the eye. Instead games of introspection might reveal a march of the zodiac, Taurus and the Hyades shining in fine relief, and a different arrangement of kings and princesses, heroes and maidens arranged in their own procession along the ecliptic.

Hints of aurum glimmer in the crystal balance of the pointed dome, enacting the grandeur whilst Strange learns the balance and limits of his current powers. His tumble brings Wanda sitting up, her gaze trailing after him as he trips down the causeway of the Evening Star. Several rolling bushes flatten, rustling, reaching out their tendrils for him and bending a soft cushion to catch him should the Cloak not. They lack for thorns, their ruddy petals swishing towards his shoulders or side, dusted in an oiled brushstroke of indigo and heliotrope that slides across the serrated leaves.

Eventually, he shall right himself and learn the laws of the land, the way the garden itself responds to those who draw near. The weight of their intention colours the very foliage, and it entices a reaction from the pliant landscaping, drawing them near or shying away from a touch in the glade opening in the foliage.

As Strange approaches, she languidly sprawls where she is, drawing minute lines with her fingertips fanned against her brow, palm up. The melodies struck between hushed seas and laughter from some distant bird conveyed over the breeze might leave the witch languid, but she tips an upside-down smile upon the man with his incorrigible spirit for life, the zest of immutable curiosity sacrificing age. Chin lifted, she meets his kiss for the benediction it is, glimmering gold with an edge of citrine to meet the blood aureate payment of her own kiss. There is the very faintest trace of the self-inflicted bite, a welt upon her lower lip, slightly sensitive to the touch yet. But too the rush of citrus and the intrigues of the water upon his mouth unmistakable. Mind, she’d know that flavour anywhere.

So will he. Better distractions: the pressure of his mouth, the way her head tilts to align them better so she might sample his lips. A sigh flutters between them. Goodness, and a cornucopia of wants, and this is but the first berry.

“Stephen, if you wish to fly, that is not the way to do it.” She slides off the silver wrought bench, the nebulous padding rising in a more playful array of clouds that drip over the sides in light seaspun mist. More creeps about, meandering around her ankles fondly and carrying on, but the starsheen haze never touches one of the four great porphyry columns. There the stars burn merrily, four in total, lending their glow through the strangest of ultraviolet and hot blue spectra.

Thin fingers splayed wide, the witch nets the passing zephyr. Eyes bright with the amaranth tinge of the Sight, she catches the tail end and pulls it back, expertly plying a few individual coils and winding her arms around her in something terribly close to an embrace. Her closed fist touches the opposite hit, arm diagonally drawn over her torso, following her flat stomach and uplifting her bust, and anchoring her closed hand on the upper bony mount of her hipbone. The other hand draws a halo around her bowed head, on the back-cycle curving down the nape of her neck and pulling her chestnut hair to one side. She drags her fingers over the raised sweep of her breast and skips down to meet her hand at her hip.

Hopping once and alighting up, she suddenly floats and bobs up five feet. “Voila.”

How can she not hear the audible sound of their lips disengaging for the depressing note it is? Strange listens to the words spoken against his mouth before leaning back to allow her to stand. Groggy? Just a bit, but in the best way. Twitterpated, to quote a Disney movie that was released when he was a teenager and full of said twitterpating hormones. The resurgence of them scintillates through his blood.

A series of movements and then, with the sprightliness of a fawn, skip -- up she goes. The Sorcerer nods, smiling up at her in heavy-lidded amusement.

“Just like that then?” Never mind answering his question, he’s already gathering up a nearby breath of air and creating his own strands. It’s more willpower and forcing the thought of braided lengths on the air than actual handiwork, but then he goes about the movements, attempting to mimic them precisely. Arm across his body, fist resting just above the pocket of his dress pants; the circular motion about his head, complete with lower angle near the back, and then his finger drawn diagonally across his sternum.

A little jump in place and he’s in the air, if only for a moment, eyes twinkling at having beaten her little challenge.

Yes, he’s in the air, and with the aid of the water, he remains in the air. Floating is his happiest state, buoyancy of a foot or two above the ground something to be achieved with effort. Eventually he will sink down to about four inches shy of the platform formed of those interlocked hexagonal crystals, a very pretty pattern when seen from above. The mother of all rivers forms the spring beneath the surface, and above, he might witness the glitter of water pouring through the chasm to appear on the northern face and weave away through the many pools.

Wanda swings her feet from the invisible crescent spiral of wind that supports her, teasing at several individual threads of the breeze to better suit her webwork. Those circular patterns and curlicues in the benches are not merely for show; they give actual patterns one might base their designs upon.

The first charged glow of the evening star touches the pillars, and their undulating surfaces channel that faint glimmer from star-tipped crown to the base, revealing forever altering curtains. Stellar ones give no distortion except where certain colours show truer and shadows play, deep amaranth on heliotrope, or grey on silver. The pillars serve well to measure the advance of time.

Another netted breeze twists and spins on itself, gathered into knots the more that Strange’s will directs it as much as his hands do. He snares whole tufts of the element, and it feels simultaneously a little tacky and cotton fluffy in his hands, warmed by the late spring balm lying over Buyan. Not fully high summer, not even close, this is a time with a bit of chill to the air and a hint of nip for fun. Nonetheless, his net clings close, remembering long, warm afternoons and the dewy beginnings of the dawn when another Zorya rides triumphant through the gates. Air can be slightly fluid despite being fully gaseous, and the wind practically rattles a friendly purr when made to hum and twist in its confinement until settled.

Mostly settled. He can feel those bands shifting and fitting to the paths of least resistance, pulling on his clothes and tugging here and there. They do not pull hard; it’s a zephyr, and not Boreas’ bastard. The buoyancy he enjoys shifts a little for the rotation of the endless, captivated puffs of a teasing bluster. His final motions to imitate her bring a firmer weight around his back, and the sinking down effectively completes the gesture.

...and his arms aren’t going to necessarily rise. Nor can he go running like a horrified lamb in a thunderstorm, all legs and fluffy tail, for the hills below the walled city visible deeper in over the blushed, rising hedgerows studded by countless roses and rarer, exotic flowers only now emerging from the spectral gloom. Some of those buds were visible, but many weren’t and it’s only with the beginnings of dusk they phase into existence. Delicate traces of phosphorescence along the margins of their petals warn to what they are, the most ephemeral of beings: moonflowers, jasmine star clocks, cup of the night, nicotiana, primrose, Selene’s mirror, blue lotus, cereus, cynthianthus, and on and on it goes.

A distraction, possibly, if he starts to twitch and fight his bonds. The Witch knows what he’s about potentially, and she finishes with another tug on the passing current of air to draw out a gossamer thread barely visible, threaded through by a faint sky-blue current. “I wanted to show you how to hand…” A pause follows when she realizes his predicament as the clotted bunching of the zephyr effectively wraps up her beloved in a ribbon. The cocky smile and the assured, dominant fashion of the sorcerer’s technique can so easily catch one off-guard.

Her lips part slightly. “-- fast…” The rest of the statement isn’t coming forth. She slips off her airy cradle, seeming to follow the fluted lip of an orchid or a fountain, and leaps to her footing. “Oh my darling.” Circling, her eyes go wide, pupils immediately swallowing half the available tawny real estate, and her teeth catch her lower lip prisoner for gawking. Her pulse is jumping twenty beats higher than it was a heartbeat before, and behind her, red and scarlet pimpernels take shape and blow away to land among the lotuses that send up an intense, surreal glow. Shadows wash the hue of ultramarine and superviolet.

A fingertip extended almost, almost touches his sternum as she closes. “Is this an invitation? You want me to take my fill of you, love?”

Betrayed! Betrayed by zephyr and the entire island of Buyan aligning against him! Woe!

You bet that smile is wiped away to be replace first with consternation at how he can’t seem to separate the pulse-points at his wrists. Then it shifts a bit towards frustration as he considers how he can’t exactly bring them up from where they rest just beneath his navel because, for some damn reason, there’s an entrapping length of braided wind around --

No. No, she didn’t?! The Sorcerer looks up at her with a flash of shock that’s probably as delicious as the fine expansion of his pupils at her approach. His throat bobbles as he wriggles more, extending fingers and clutching them, teeth flashing bright in the ambient light, but can’t break the bonds he wove so cleverly about himself. Soooo cleverly. Little lamb-kin won’t bleat, but he sure as hell will tremble.

The nearing of her pointed finger to his skin seems to raise hairs and heartbeat alike until scarlet shows at the corners of his spread of vision -- the same scarlet as to when they first crossed paths, in that firelit living room many months ago. Utterly betrayed, caught in a net, subject to whatever she damn well pleases if he can’t form mudras -- surely she can’t blame how his smirk is a bit edged. This a deep-set concern of his, able to muddy the waters running through him.

“Very shrewd, beloved,” he murmurs, trying not to lick his lips. It’s hard to stay mad at her when citrus and rose lingers on the skin, each taste able to wend into his self-control and force it apart, like the curling vines of the night-blooming flowers that release such healthy scent to the air around them. “You caught me, well done. Have I penned the invitation then?”

Well, it wasn’t as though she anticipated him matching her gesture for gesture with such force that he practically knotted the wind around himself, but reap what Strange sows.

It so happens she halts slightly before closing with him, her finger poised directly above his breastbone. Brilliant light shines in her eyes, a starburst blown out from the minute pinpoints of colour forming within the great discs etched onyx as the void. Lush fuchsia deepens towards the infrared side of the spectrum, kicked into smoldering chains of wracked smoke. A blink and those wings roll over the corners, leaving her decidedly perplexed.

“No,” she says, finality clattering through every pause where no words lie. With a step back, the Transian witch eyes the alignment critically. Puncture marks scarred at his neck may feed uncertainty, and every mystic limited by gestures and words dreads the loss of will and motion. Her weaknesses exhibited in different ways so often strike at the heart of her confidence, and that is a perilous thing when one’s entire grip on creation defines how safe, in some ways, that reality is. Her fingertips skim sharp up to her collarbone and curl deliberately inwards against the thinnest stretch of skin laid out over that precipitous ossified drop.

And in, just enough for nails to bite. Pressure will leave a string of minute crescents, nothing enough to impart a bruise over the sandstone relief.

With a shake of her head, she walks around him, slowly, as not to startle. It takes some hard guesswork to measure where the wind is knotted and snarled, and then she sets herself to untangling it, loosening pieces and tugging on others. Separating the recalcitrant and stymied zephyr is not instantaneous; his mental will is entirely stronger than hers, meaning those knots are commensurately harder to undo. But give some time and they will come away, allowing mobility and then finally tossing them aside.

He floats there, as patiently as possible, awaiting the moment when he can do more with his hands than flex them in a mute show of concern. Last time an attempt like this occurred, he was beyond initial caring and deep within the territory of the finest display of musicality he’s encountered in his yet-to-be long-lived life. Too soon, too awake. The drums of his life-beat pound in his ears even as he finally succumbs to brushing a tongue over his lips and tastes the ghost of her kiss.

It softens his expression a good amount and the relief of the loosened bonds compounds it in a cool wash that drowns the sizzling of nerves that burn due to stymied flexion rather than desire. 

“Thank you,” he whispers, rubbing his wrists where the bonds rested. They were cottony-soft, not in the least abrasive, so it’s not as if he has ligature marks on his skin; just the phantom remnants of sensation echoing due to generalized hypersensitivity. The Sorcerer hovers there for a moment before heavily sighing and spinning in place to look for her. Wherever she is, he watches her before offering up, “I know I did it to myself, I do. But...it was too much of a surprise. I don’t -- I don’t like _that_ aspect of it. If…” And what’s this? A sudden shyness to him? He averts his eyes and seems to suck on his teeth before meeting her gaze again to say, point blank, “You. You do it. Yourself, not me. I’m forewarned.”

No hint of cut-off circulation, no bruise to the skin. When the winds give way, they go whirling around in lazy circles, obstructed only by the porphyry column nearest them, and rise to chase the imbalance in temperatures that faster-cooling rock and soil.

One elemental cradle released, but there is still the other near invisible web anchored by a bit more finesse than strength. Orienting upon it by memory and a quick check in the widened field of her arcane perception, the sorceress wordlessly approaches it and uses touch to orient upon the two primary hinge points. Pulling the fickle little tendrils caught on the wind-knots is no easier than his efforts were, but the lack of tension in the aerial scaffolding plays to advantage. It will soon enough blow apart and the components -- all balmy western breezes -- wander where they will.

Some rustle the flat grey leaves and the rusted out blossoms, and vanish into a dense thicket where shadow has probably not been touched by the wind in a century. A few glancing blows by light thrown by the stars deflects against the raised aegis denying such a disturbance from reaching through the front line. She brushes off one of the thorned canes, her leather coat scratched along the sleeve.

“Yes.” Simple words sometimes convey far more than an explanation in lines upon lines ever will. Enough to give a slight nod, and blow out a breath towards the encroaching brushes as she sidesteps them, retreating into the square to stand opposite the notched side where the spring plays. That puts her facing the direction they arrived by, and she stares off towards the southern arc of the water, the dark gardens hemming in the southern side more of a wall than anything else.

“Explore as you want. I will not be going anywhere.” Wanda walks down the crystalline path, and gauges distance, moving a few steps to the side, several paces forward. She hesitates, then stops, retreating one or two blocks. Good enough to sit, then, and patiently watch the stars rise and the charcoal waves on the boughs rise and fall in their own time.

 

Rebuffed, the Sorcerer goes through his own moments of reticence. He watches her motions in silence, in how the ambient light reacts and refracts around her, notes how the wind responds to her freeing of its knots. So there was a plan there, all hers, and yes, he’d fallen into it easily. The burn of self-recrimination, sprung from self-preservation and hard-learned lessons, is eased by the sluicing of Vitae. It seems here that the water is a cure-all for near-all. Makes sense, given that it wells up to form the Mother River.

His lips thin as he considers her further, especially after seeing her retreat not only away from him, but into herself. What does he know of his Beloved? More importantly, where has he seen this before? Withdrawal, not looking directly at him, making oneself smaller, dismissive statements… Oh, of course. Illyana. Embarrassed. The Witch is embarrassed.

He can boil it down to that without accessing the pentacle’s connection between them. Given the ability of the sensate, he doesn’t dare open it. The repercussions would likely overwhelm him, if only momentarily. In his peripheral, the crimson Cloak, silent spectator, shifts and he glances over at it. A shake of his head commands it to remain in place; take a nap, bub, it might be a while.

Not quite sure how to set feet to the ground once more, Strange wills himself to fly over and hover before her, much like a hummingbird. His aura thrums, perhaps deliberately, flitting at the edges of her own, and no, he’s not going away.

“So, it didn’t go as you wanted,” he says quietly. “That’s why communication is important. Talk to me, Rakshasi, even in the moment. I said it earlier and I’ll say it again: I’m forewarned.” If she looks up, she’ll see a soft, forgiving half-smile on his face. No smirk, just affection and understanding. She, he -- they’re only human. “Everyone stumbles in figuring out what their lover likes and dislikes. Gods below, I expect to make a mess of it one day. Don’t go thinking I’m perfect. I don’t love you any less, even if I was uncomfortable at your hands. It was only a moment.”

A passing susurrus ruffles his hair, his dress-shirt, and he takes in a deep breath before sighing it out. He’ll be brave, for her. She might change his mind.

“I am forewarned.”

Both hands offered up, crossed at the wrists.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stephen submits to Wanda's wicked intentions, sealed by a kiss and a heady amount of trust. She prepares to fully take advantage of that. But rope would be too easy for this particular spiderweb.

The gardens are the warning: flaking shades of a colourless red, the matte hue of a leaden sky, a battleship under the waves, the ash after a fire. Those plants, every one, in proximity to her lack colour and bear their own kinds of armaments: thorns, coiled tendrils to clutch, and flat, tangled pathways. There isn’t much to speak of among the flowers but for their sickly and foreboding hue, and not one of them is open to reveal a cancerous heart. Or anything at all, each pinched unto naught.

Whatever else, she stares past the crystalline path at the empty space between herself and the nearest bush, and gives a blank sort of anti-focus that might be intended to do something. No flame-skulled demon steps through. No embodiment of mother earth, no ragged procession of spirits or wobbly tentacle appendages waving through the hole in reality. Just her and the air, the sea pounding away at the beach under a gentler hand than most, and no gap back to the Witch Road in Buyan’s defenses.

In her defense, she isn’t trying. In everyone’s defense, it would be better if she didn’t. The only effect she might get has a detonator attached: herself.

There’s very little of her aura to find, a bubbling morass pinned tight to her skin. The witch isn’t sufficiently educated enough to scour it out of existence or prune it hard enough back to allow new development, and the tidal ebb of ego, withdrawing to purge the self by other castigations and means, permits very little to gather near the surface. The soul blaze barely moves, and when it does, it’s closer to sticky magma or lava that bubbles, spits, and hardens back into uneasy quiescence. It wants to be neither rock or fluid heat, surrendered to a weird in-between state. So those energies don’t move.

There’s a trick to being a twin, especially the younger one. The same trick of survival under harsh circumstances: stop being. Easier as the shadow, better as the unseen, will yourself away, away, away. Oh, it’s completely escapist behaviour fit to annoy any halfway competent psychologist, but the witch is somewhat better at invisibility socially than disappearing. And it’s not embarrassment at play so much as a far deeper, leaner fissure in the self. Pride is no friend, rammed in as the wedge to cut so much further.

Grudgingly tongue and lips will stir because they must; nothing stops Wanda from listening to the Sorcerer, but it’s a pale wraith that devoured the vibrancy and cast out the broken bits from a capitulated and razed duchy. “Not much for talking. I talk too much and say nothing..” It’s accurate; her essential nature isn’t the most loquacious, and her default setting is dead silent. It’s the broken armour worn for the world at large and the first faulty line of defense. A nearer truth: she sometimes hates _explaining_ herself.

The assessment in those flat, shallow sand-mire eyes is hard to assess, a flick upwards to acknowledge Strange’s statements that she hasn’t contested, much less stormed as a bastille for a cause. “I love you.” Simple, that. Putting her thumb to her lips, she drags her bottom teeth along the skin between corner of the nailbed and knuckle, worrying at it til the cuticle tears, and it’s barely even noted.

  
A minute shake of her head follows, her gaze dropped back again. “Not now, I .. no. Cannot. Don’t think you were wrong. I was. I am very sorry.” Shoulders rise and drop, and she stares out moodily at nothing again. What can she hope to say to him that makes any sense? 

Knowing is half the battle, and acting is the other half. Broken eggshells, shattered glass, ideas taken a stone. She goes quiet, biting of any half-raised sentiment, and stays tremendously still, not so much drawn in as blown out. Tenuous movements tug in her coat slightly, making room for him. Misery loves company.

Rebuffed twice now does give him cause to frown and stifle down a curl of exasperation. It’s the experience of the life lived near twice to hers, a point of matching oddity between them, coming into friction with the relative inexperience. The hands are redacted, drawn back and then folded away as he listens.

It seems so simple to him. He knows it’s not for her, truly, and he empathizes. In this instance, the student has been swatted in the knuckles with a ruler by a teacher most staunch. For one like him, with a blazing confidence that may bend but never break, it’s try-and-try-again. However, as he notes her minute shifting, he reminds himself that it’s not what she wants to hear. Not that bluntly. She’s not his apprentice; she’s his love.

Down to the temple’s floor he goes, boots rolling until his lightened weight holds fast to the surface, and it’s easy enough to settle into the place beside her. Whether she likes it or not, it does align them arm to arm, hip to hip, and with how he naturally sits, outer thigh to outer thigh. She’s warm as always, though not as vibrantly as normal. A glance over at her with scrutinizing Sight shows him how tamped her aura is. It also shows him the ebb and flow of his own, now very much encroaching into her personal Mystic space with quiet, insistent presence.

No hiding. It’s not a demand, just a gentled fact.

“I don’t feel like I’m owed an apology, but alright, thank you. I accept it.” One scarred hand begins on the line of his dress pants, rubbed up and down the long length of muscle as he blows out a sigh. “So... here we are, at the Pillars of Dusk, sitting and talking. This is -- this is fine.” Hesitantly, the hand slips over onto the leg clothed in leather pants pressed so closely to him. His thumb rubs soothingly back and forth as he gives the firm flesh a reassuring squeeze.

Strange looks up at her profile. He doesn’t like the bleakness in those eyes, in how she seems drawn and fragile. Her pain is his and the sympathetic pangs get multiplied a few times by the waters within his system.

“Beloved, we are fine. You are fine. I don’t know what else I can tell you.” He overturns the hand atop her thigh, clearly opening the pathway for further dialogue, either spoken or unspoken.

Those long, slim fingers bear a fresh wound, delivered by her teeth, but nothing that a bit of time won’t heal. They steal across the distance, settling upon his wrist and edging upwards to the mount of his palm. Almost shyly the three longest angles diagonally to his thumb, stroking along the developed muscles, the shallow valley below. Her feathery touch barely constitutes a tickle, not meant to even approach such.

It’s doubly a diversion upon Strange, albeit the curving of her spine allows her to put her head against his shoulder, led by her temple nudging at his deltoid muscles. Chin tucked in, arm wedged between them until she pastes her elbow to her side, Wanda is doing a good job being a thin silhouette reduced to a moon silvered wafer against a more stable, animated presence.

Hexes lie in her blood, bubbling away, utterly unchained. She gives them no outlet. Instead she steals warmth though the balmy night is more than warm, a comfortable seventy degrees or so, and yet her skin might as well be iced given the shivers rolling through with the periodic frequency of thunderstorms over the plains he knew so well as a child.

Huff puff. “The wind. Take a bit and put around you here.” Fingers nudge his wrist, briefly, and then her hand rotates up to mirror his, digits hooking around his and glued in place. Try shaking them off, it won’t be fun. She states tersely, “Then here, same place with the other end.” Her own. The hand fast, for all its symbolic overtones, serves an illustrative purpose. “Next, light. Shape the same, pull and make a cobweb with it. Float. The light, the wind, can bend.”

An explanation, much as they’re like ashes in her mouth, goes bit by bit until bereft of air to sustain it. Largely surrendering that space to listen to Strange, she reserves the silence for herself, still terribly quiet and unmoving. No doubt did he wear the Cloak, she would hide under the fabric and every sanguine fold until the end of the world. This is enough, to breathe him in, to surrender id and ego on the cold pyre that swallows up all.

And to shudder out a long, annoyed sigh, right up until reclosing her eyes and sliding her cheek over his shirt is effective.

His pulse jumps a bit at how she reciprocates. This is progress, drawing the color back into her bit by bit. He leans back, sparingly, more presence than counter-pressure. A lock of her hair falls across his shirt in a stark curl of silk smelling like her; his nose, attentive and energized, can pick out such a faint scent. After all, it is _her_ flower he knows so well.

Her delicate fingers fit so well between his, filling spaces and assuring a slow return to normalcy. Like fitting pieces of a puzzle together, their interlaced grip parallels her explanation as to her intentions. Perhaps, with how she so heavily leans against him now, practically rubbing like a cat, she can feel his nod in the motions of his shoulder muscles and at the brush of his jawline against her hair. It’s so incredibly soft, strands of mink that manage to make his nape tingle in their passing.

The tear at her thumb won’t do, however. Self-mutilation will not do, especially not in reproaching oneself.

“ _Changa_ ,” the Sorcerer murmurs. Intensity directly ties into intent, of course, and the evocation is but a curling wisp of twinkling fog in a blue nearing Forget-Me-Nots. It encircles the bloody spot before diving into it. Blue shifts gold as it melts to her skin and closes off the small wound. There, all better. As an extra measure, he brings the knuckle to his lips to kiss it.

Hey, if mothers can do it, the Sorcerer Supreme can do it too. Mantra and all, y’know. That other title he carries so near and dear.

“It’s an interesting aspect to this dimension, the ability to shape the elements like that.” His amaranthine-lit eyes travel around the expanse of the temple once more, seeming to remind himself of the grandeur around them. No matter than some of the plants suffered from her emotional null, it remains ridiculously amazing. “The only limit is imagination when you get down to it.”

His free hand reaches out and Strange enacts a beckoning of both a nearby languid cloud of starlit-mist as well as some of the ambient light of the Pillars. The softball-sized sphere hanging in the air above his palm can’t seem to decide which element to become; it shifts with inevitable consistency, though at unpredictable moments, between coiling zephyr and scintillating webby shine and some liquid-like amalgamation with semi-translucent mercurial glint and weightlessness unparalleled.

Those sharp eyes, lined in dark lashes, seem to grow distant in concentration as he injects his will into the shifting orb. It shudders, little waves riffling across each expanse of surface, and morphs. Puddling at first on some invisible surface, lithe shapes draw up for seconds, half-seconds, milliseconds, reflecting the speed of his mind. Cube becomes dodecagon becomes static branches becomes firebird, inverted flames and all, becomes Cloak in miniature becomes a staff becomes a spider becomes a book becomes a Gate becomes the symbol for the Eye becomes the pentacle at her neck becomes a little jar becomes…

...a starlit rose. Gilded in silver, held in malleable fixation, the gift hangs above his scarred palm, so whorled with unfinished seams never meant to exist. He glances over at her with the gentler version of the dimpled smirk, awaiting her reaction.

With her eyes closed against the imperfections of the world, Wanda knows precious little of what happens beyond the descended crepe-paper of her lids. Dark lashes meet and curl in jet spikes against her pallid cheek, clumped in thick midnight spikes. Strange’s own sandalwood blend intoxicates somewhat, slipping through the cracked cuirass and social armour donned to protect herself against the many cares and threats in a little understood world.

Her adoptive father protected her against everything he thought might befall her. Yaga did the rest. Certainly, they did not know her weakness to this sacred wood beloved of perfumer’s, and they did not anticipate her fatal weakness for the way it lingers like a balm on the sorcerer’s flesh, warmed by the heat of his body to a tactile presence as much as an olfactory cloak wrapped around him. The dress shirt does a fine job capturing that essentially masculine fragrance, and denied sight, every other sense sharpens to compensate for the lack of primary input.

Assuredly had they known what impulse follows in the night hours, they would have destroyed every sandalwood tree from Finland to Madagascar.

  
The pulse at his throat dredges up a calm she does not feel. Lungs acting as great bellows that draw in oxygen force a rhythm on her that becomes almost meditative, and she is overcome despite herself, the ragged tears of anger and shame staining her knitting together. The healing spell works with the flesh. The deep pains of the soul are another business altogether. Perhaps they both work in tandem. As he stays with her a little longer on the crystalline path, she forgets the odd and uncomfortable firmness of the mineral, and though she tries not to, she cannot help but fall into a rhythm as essential to him as the functions of life.

There is a reason infants fall asleep on their mother’s breasts, why lovers end their quarrels entangled in one another’s arms. Breathe the same breath. Pulse with the same life. Touch, fraught and potent, cares nothing for walls and psychological barriers. Her fingers are stationary upon his hand, and she would be wrong in the growing gloaming, parted by no more than his shirt and her jacket, cheek sliding over his collarbone as it leads her deeper into forbidden territory. Two scars. Her forehead rests against them for a moment, a mild chiding of warm breath flowing over them, and she lays her cheek there to wait.

For him, the night grows at slow, almost imperceptible paces around the captured starlight that answers the shift and twist of his mind among its equally capricious state. The light wants to be in waves and lines, whereas the wind forms nets most easily, stirred to curl back on itself with minimal effort. Not so the beams, and the water is resilient enough to assume its own topsy turvy aqueous puddling or streaming. She is lost in his life and beyond noticing such things unless compelled vocally to crack open her eyes and disrupt the spell being woven slowest of all.

The thrill and terror of her lips brushing over his neck in lateral lines disrupts whatever conversation might be had, a one-sided exploration on his part equally as much on hers. Dreamy, somnolent eyes blink open, a little red by natural causes, and the weight of her upper body is certainly dependent upon Strange to keep her upright. “Mmm?”

Sorry, just busy over here drugging herself on the most potent intoxicant known to man short of excitement. Petal soft lips ease along his throat, velvety smooth skin addressed when it becomes a ridge of scar tissue. No insistence demands a thing there, only connection between them. That much she knows to wallow in, to shelter behind when every conscious thought demands she bury herself in the dead plants until the equivalent of a Witch dam forms, except those beavers will have great, razor sharp teeth and ignore hand grenades, blessed or not. The starlight rose warrants a nigh somnolent look, her pinned arm stirring only to wrap around the narrowing triangle of his waist.

Treacherous neck: there’s a smile. Very faint, uneven, just the corner of her lips rising despite itself. Bad mouth! She puckers the rosebud of her lips back into his collar. Not quite hiding, simply aware he’s the effect of a warm blanket on a freezing night.

Mind you, the starlight rose might just be shivering in response to the rapid onset of logic’s liquefaction at the tender mercies of her questing lips. While a more visceral response than sucking in a faint hissing breath through his teeth at the desultory sizzling spidering of lightning through his scalp, his neck, down his spine, would have splattered the construct of wind and light like an exploded paint balloon, all this entails is the dissolution of the gathered elements.

Starlight flickers off to rejoin its beams while wind whisks off to converse with the leaves of the nocturnal flora. The ricocheting sparking from the pebbled scarring continues to rattle him into responding with nothing intelligent whatsoever save for:

“Mmmmfff…!”

If that’s not a solid indicator that he holds no grudge against momentary bondage, then nothing else will do. She might use his name to her full advantage; there’s a chance he has the upper hand in wordless exultations to her effects on him.

“Oh _gods_.” Breathed in the same sense of being subjected to a deep shoulder rub, with that purling from the back of his throat. He’s been hiding behind his eyelids, swapping one sense for another as the Witch beside him did for a time, and now those lids rise in a dazed flutter. Tongue swiped over dry lips collects that phantom residue of a kiss given what seems like eons ago. Sweet, tangy citrus and her own ambrosial taste.

“Again,” he murmurs, offering up the sensitized patch of skin to her with the relaxation of the line of his shoulder and cant of his jaw at a diagonally-upwards angle.

This is deliberate, all of it. Partial planning with the reins ripped away from mentorly stratagems and clutched white-knuckled by Aqua Vitae’s vertiginous coils.

There’s a saying about two birds with one stone, but what about two Mystics with one commonality in lust?

Two mystics can suffer many little deaths with one stone. Preferably if that stone happens to be a crystal wand.

Starlight coming apart warrants a widening of the narrowed aperture of her eyes, the sun dawning over the horizon in lunar crescents instead of a full disc. Her expression changes slightly to a mirroring of loss, the dissolution forcing her to pull her mouth away from Strange’s neck in a question. After all, she sought comfort in a sense, and gave herself over to trying to re-establish bonds in her mind went and snapped or frayed badly by a surprise. This then might be the inverse of that, a sense of stepping in it again.

Right up until her auditory system overrides the chirping worry alarums going off in the cortex, and force the entirety of Wanda Maximoff to shut up and start _listening_. Her pulse, slowing to trot alongside his, instead of galloping fitfully like a spooked mare, takes a solid thump and lands on the other side of a hurdle at full canter. Her intuition knows exactly the language spoken without being prompted, and she slowly lowers her chin back to the crook of his shoulder where her cheek rested all along.

Like this? The same horizontal branding brushes her warm, dry mouth against the ridges created by two canines piercing the surface, and with care she stitches back and forth. No licentiousness yet; blame her for teasing later while she stirs up this storm in a fragile porcelain teapot, testing for stress fractures and imperfections upon his neck. Here a kiss, there a passing dragonfly wing that dips to savour the simple familiarity of how good he smells.

Another trove of Buyan’s gifts: she doesn’t have to drink the _aqua vitae_ to experience the enhancement to certain senses. Breathing in the air will do that, eating the food will do that. The experience rests in the place they occupy, a dimension folded up in Slavic myth and barrier spells, but his is the most potent indicator. Could he but understand how deeply he’s melded into her subconscious mind and what response that entails, it might render a better explanation for the emotional reactions that sent her off to literally sit and stare morosely at bushes reacting to her own moodiness by dying. Or appearing to die, for psychotropic reactions don’t necessarily make a good indicator for health. Ask anything killed by those thorny briars and lovely flowers, even when bone white with a spectre of death.

Several of the night-blooming vines come into full flower, bursting with great dinner-plate and saucer fleurettes. Delicate silvered petals open wide to catch the first passage of constellations across the indigo sky, picked out by tender glow enfolding their stamens. Others are stranger, coming undone like origami cranes dropped on fishing lines to bring ephemeral misty koi nearby, throwing long chains of small glistening bell-flowers that take on the most delicate shadings of jade, ranging from cream to warm green.

Strange surely might note it, if his brain is still operational: it’s his desire they’re answering, one by one, those closest transformed.

Another redacted thought plunges away as she nuzzles into his neck, the heat of her breath a promise of sultry summer where this hour is perpetually locked to late May, a hope and a prayer away from the season when maidens wash their face with dew and look for their beloved’s image in fire, water, and wind. 

“You continue?” she asks, and it’s not so much aimed at distraction as setting him possibly back upon the rails. He had a purpose, after all, which she is aware she interrupted. So are the stars, that blaze mildly upon the four porphyry pillars ignited by rare and complicated sigils locked in their hidden texts upon the stone, the mysteries of evening denied to the lovebirds.

“I…I…” The vowel of self-identification is exhaled repeatedly as he attempts to scrape the jellied detritus of his proper planning from the walls of his skull. There was a plan there, truly, but it’s going to take a detox back in the real world to scrub it from the white-washed confines of his brainpan.

Speaking of brain and defining ‘operational’; that’s a slippery slope that he has no problem lying back upon and relinquishing intentions to her lips that rise and fall against his skin in branding brushes with no pattern.

“Continue…um, continue, right.” An owlish blink and thick swallow, as if his tongue is numbed once more. No mouthful of Vitae this time, a body-full of neurons that sing to her touch. His grip on her hand is tightened if only to assume her a grounding force in this moment. The Sorcerer’s posture has not changed in the least in exposing the scar site normally protected by the safety of distance and shutting of shoulder bone to ear. That long line of his neck continues to remain open to the elements. Surely she can visually locate the thrumming pulse of his artery against his skin, the way the apple of his masculinity shifts in another half-swallow as he tries so hard to remember what was scattered to the wind and starlight alike. “You continue, as you are. It doesn’t hurt. I’m not afraid, it’s like…Novocain. It’s you. You’re safe, I’m safe, we’re safe.” Heavy breathing accents pauses between each statement.

Depthless pupils, drugged wide once more, ringed in bright amethyst, stare off across the temple floor. Oh, the flowers, they’ve bloomed. They’re beautiful, yes, this is recorded to be summarily reviewed later by his unerringly-accurate photographic memory.

“Continue, please,” he says with a confidence that pitches slightly breathless.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The smut arrives! All hail the sexy-times train.

The race of her tongue up the line of the artery might bring back confounding memories from a dark corner of the mind; let that be considered with warning, for Wanda does nothing yet to encroach on that forbidden grey zone. She instead blows out a breath over his bare skin to cool the track already made, turning the tingle that might arise out of fear into one of temperature-enforced change. The prospect of the flat velvet plateau once again skidding back down reheats what she just spent a few seconds assiduously cooling, entrusting in her ability to toy with his capacity to withstand changes in the overall air temperature.

It was done well enough with candle wax, this might be every bit as effective.

“You smell good,” she murmurs. Those words aren’t particularly skillful or poetic, though they state a simple fact for why she so enjoys burying her nose in his hair and inching lower, until her face hides against his collar when it’s not occupied or guarded by the fine terror of the Cloak. Sanguine moments spent in quiet contemplation have nothing on the powerful impact of being disassembled piece by piece by one’s lover, all in their own good time.

Her hand climbs up his mid-spine, inspecting intently every bit of the bony ridges through his shirt. She presses the fabric flat and kneads it in, as though she might fully examine him like a surgeon about to perform some intent, elaborate bit of artistry to correct damaged fascia on vertebrae #9. Yet this is purely tactile, another summary advancement of active participation to show all is well, and safe.

Against his earlobe, the movement of her lips and the flick of her tongue play games of a hummingbird with a flower. “Should we sit on the bench? More comfort than the path.” This cannot be denied; cloudy nebula stuff or even alabaster beats crystal.

Or he can weave himself another wind hammock, get tied up in it, and be forlornly hung there while she preys upon the weak point of his neck until he bucks and growls in forgotten languages to ask for things only the gods comprehend.

Another trail of her tongue, another brush of her lips zigzagging lazily from left to right. “If I had you at a tree,” she idly notes, reverberating murmurs running along the column of his throat while she waits for the singing zing of the sensations unleashed to settle lower into his body, “I would have pinned you differently. My hips, I think. Or my mouth.”

His free hand is now gripping at the angled edging of said geometric face of the raised path, another attempt to keep himself from floating away.

It’s getting very, very hard to remain still, but it has nothing to do with discomfort. Already alight with the fires of life, she stokes the coals into a conflagration that threatens to subject his body to the same fate as his earlier gathering of localized elements. The massaging at his spine makes him arch his back in the same way a cat might offer up more curvature to be adored.

Her comment regarding the sandalwood about his person is missed entirely. The question, marked by the lilt, is noted enough to draw his attention back to the present, though it’s with reluctance to withdraw from the warmth suffusing every inch of him.

“Unngh.” Try again, good Doctor, that’s another language entirely than the one you meant to utilize. “Could use the bench?” His inflection is drunken rather than ringing in mezzo-soprano bells. The rise and fall of his chest is marked and then a hitch as she drives a stake through the memory of the Enchantress with brutal accuracy.

Palm trees will never be the same; blonde tresses will forever be chestnut, emerald will always bleed to scarlet, and wine will never smell like anything but black roses.

Oh gods, he’ll be daydreaming about that one for days. Nay, weeks. Months? Years.

Let the Witch permanently wipe away those clinging wraiths of bad memories, at her hand, and he’ll be forever grateful for it. The memories overwriting them will be instead of scarlet starlight and vespers of eternal-summer’s origin on an isle lost to time and space alike.

“Pin me.” That’s right, she heard him correctly. “That’s what you wanted, do it. The ropes, the wind ropes.” A low groan and then her name whispered brokenly. “Do it.” Why not? Why the hell not? She’s managed not only fracture the recollection of the Asgardian poacher into smithereens, the Vitae is actively drawing up the mana injected by a previous potent kiss and eating away the icy tendrils of nightmarish fangs like fuses alit. Flash-sizzle-burn; take that, vampire bitch.

Maybe he’s overweaned on confidence, but can she partake of his excess?

The young woman pauses midstroke of her tongue, another of those sublime tastes of his skin -- she’ll never get tired of the tang of him, ever -- aborted when he speaks. The heady awareness for where her next move might be is not so many steps ahead in the game that his interruptions cause any ripples, nor capable of sabotaging whole theorems on what, how, and when.

A musical hum plies his throat instead and she slides away from him, properly seated beside Strange for a moment. Her arm remains against the breadth of his back, hand cupping the top of his hip, and then she tries to find her own solitary existence long enough to process anything by way of intelligent discourse or conversational response. The lightning bolt may have scored a few holes through her brain before it reached functional territory. 

“Starlight between the pillars,” she helpfully suggests, the words bouncing out in place of anything else that stuttered to awakening. Fourteen blue lotuses open their petals and float along the rim of the mana river, and her cheeks ought to be flaming red. The best they muster: dusty pink, matching _other_ places that can similarly echo the same sunset shade, brushed lightly over golden skin for embellishment.

Fly in the witch spider’s web? Apparently so, given she must scramble to her feet and catch her thoughts before they fly away again and suggest things yet more profanely realized, an imaginative burden in a garden of dark delights. Tongue lapping her bruised lower lip, Wanda tries to collect ideas from the salvage heap and his utterance of her name in those deliciously low baritone syllables, delivered in that slightly newscaster English accent by way of the Mid-West (as the BBC would say) does things it ought not, liquefying her to the core and requiring a look anywhere but him.

Reaching for the wind is not easy. The light moves even faster, tripping fantastic through the dimension, and yet there are places that capturing it is simpler. On reflective surfaces, further up the path in the square ruled by a Zorya of the Evening Star, sister to Morning and Midnight. Her gentle footsteps will be heard only after she tugs on his arm to lift him up with her, and urge him to follow. Wind webs and light weavings take a good amount of artistry to perform, but hers is a lighter hand at least.

  
It will start simply enough. “Catch the wind. Anchor it to our wrists. I can do the rest. Easier when the wind will not run away.” 

That’s probably how she started, pinning it to her hip and then creating the hanging support network.

Thank the gods for the weightlessness imbued by the Aqua Vitae. Without it, he might have risen to his feet at her insistent grip at his wrist only to stumble and possibly faceplant. Sitting in one position long enough has left muscles momentarily strained and his right foot semi-tingling. The feelings quickly abate with the vivifying dimension’s effects and he follows easily enough, only somewhat weak in the knees.

The skin at his neck tightens with electrified absence of her lips. As if he could do anything _but_ follow in the Witch’s wake. They sing about invoking a spell and making someone belong solely to the caster - she does it with simple instructions that he can’t refuse. There is a harried aspect to her body, a disbelief he knows instinctively to come from the insecurity he just spent time warding off, and besides, who knows? He might come to like this particular kink.

It’s a bit more difficult with one hand, but he manages it. A passing zephyr is snagged once more and shaped to his will, albeit with a notable decrease in strength. The result isn’t a ribbon so much as a strand, light-weight and glittering with silver. The threading around his wrist and hers, all executed with wordless gravity and dreamy expression, creates an infinity loop once the ends are connected. It whisks like the smallest jet stream around both sets of carpal bones, masculine and feminine alike.

“Like this?” Spoken rough, low, rich like the sawing draw of a bow across cello strings. Composure has returned to some extent, but only as a facade. Adjusting the flare of a blowtorch might give the impression of narrowing the flame, but it sure as hell doesn’t decrease the white-hot temperature at its core.

A nod answers Strange’s efforts once he tugs and snags the lightweight effigy of Zephyrus’ likeness into submission, swiping its tail end around them both and locking together their hands, palm to palm, fingers still free to curl and weave or dodge one another. She doesn’t even trust herself to speak, let alone conjure up something outside her native Transian or its sister tongues, neither of which is shared.

The white-hot touch aptly sends a pang through her, a tingle as visions ply her addled mind in fine detail. Her senses may not be blown as widely open as his, but neither are they dulled in any respect. Buyan’s blessing is their curse, non-deities as they are, creatures of reality rather than illusion and mythology. Every tactile sensation experienced heightened by a magnitude, vision expanded twenty-fold in a range of colours, even hearing catches the little soft shoulders in every word to deepen and enrich the experience. That’s his reality; hers is not much different as a predicament.

With a sigh, the witch disturbs one of the misty tumbles off plants that clamber up a trellis arch and through the faint sheen, locates and isolates one of the slanting beams of moonlight. It proves the softest of lights, an ideal medium rather than trying to incorporate the electrifying tease of starry light upon a man already close to bolting like a stallion out of a burning barn.

It moors to one of the pillars, flung like a lasso and wavering at the point of impact. “We shall have to give thanks to Zorya later,” she murmurs, abrasive mezzosoprano rasping over his ears as much as the quivering light awaits its final outcome.

That means braiding the angular beams that separate from the main shaft, pulling them free and working them among the coils of the zephyr. The breeze is far more likely to loop than the moonmotes are, and she needs the anchorage points to make something a great deal more resilient than the one which she sat on. Eyes narrowed in concentration, she stitches and spins the beginnings of his entanglement between two points of contact; the pillars of Dusk themselves, at least the ones facing the ocean, giving a better spot for a view over the folded sea in wind-dark tones, burgundy that becomes increasingly empurpled towards the shore where the lacework of foam is lighter of periwinkles.

Decidedly focused, she must hold relatively still, her hand clasping Strange’s for fear she might start to pull him towards whatever she does, and send him tumbling headfirst into a tapestry. Her shuttle isn’t visible, but the pliant elements are not the kind to lash out violently when captured so. A girl who must braid her hair hasn’t much trouble, any more than he is likely to experience even afflicted by a palsy.

And in this, they’re tied together until she chooses to separate them. “Moon web,” she says, pointing to the vestige of a crescent moon crossed by some trumpeting blossom, the upper horn not coming to any sort of point, but instead spilling backward on a on a floral curl. It rather looks like a comfortable place to recline rather than tie him fully upright or flat on his back, something more supine on a curve that likewise frees him to see whatever happens instead of being held in suspense. Suspension, that’s another matter.

“For me, I might keep my hands over my head.” That sentence sounds strange, but she owes it to him to explain. “You, in front of you again. Yes?”

If he can make it through this endeavor with any grey matter remaining through his ears, he’ll light an entire forest of incense to the Zorya three. The Sorcerer is most definitely a-tremble, though it’s delicious rather than a bolt of flight versus fight or even freezing up entirely. Her palm, trapped against his, is his personal pillar as he watches the weaving occur.

Gods below, his attempt with the zephyr looked dunderheaded in comparison to her skill. It’s beautiful, something he’ll have trouble explaining to anyone, much less someone of the Mystic fold. It’s one thing to weave a tangible element like water or earth, harder more to control the ephemeral elements of fire and air. The blossoming hammock is made real by her skilled hand and he’s left to consider the sight. Words do it no justice. His dreams might, for it seems of their ilk.

Sight-lightened eyes rest on the Witch for a long moment as he processes her sentence and query with the speed of quicksilvered molasses. The vivid imagery that flashes before his inner eye sends a blazing sluice down his spine. Surely she can’t fault him for the hanging of his jaw, not clownish in nature, but sheer shock at the _potential_. Oh. Oh, they’ll be pursuing that.

Finally, Strange answers not with words, but with committed movements: he offers up his hands before him, wrists pressed to touching angles. His scarred fingers offer up a flower of their own before him. A shuddering exhale escapes him as his pupils blow wider still. This fine line he dances is intoxicating in and of itself. This is the moment where she may learn of his unconscious need to regularly tempt what he considers dangerous fate. In this instance, no danger but for the possibilities ahead of him and the knowledge of just how he might perceive all of it.

The injustice in the world begs for righting by some means, re-attaining equilibrium by some particular act. Water breaks through the constricting forces that dam it. Man commands a slope too well and the soil crashes down in a landslide. Tiptoeing very carefully around uncertain margins requires the high state of alert, and Wanda does not allow herself to exist outside the immediate moment. She pauses when the sorcerer, blessed and favoured of the Vishanti, effectively surrenders something of that power by holding out his hands. In turn when he does that, he offers her palm in turn, for they are yet bound together, fasted by wrist and wind and will.

That, and the very symbol of how he brought her to fall and resist the whims of the very man who rivaled him for the favour of the Ancient One; the spellcraft of a flower, cousin to the one that lives perpetually in a charmed circle in their bedroom. Oh, yes, she’s kept that rose of starlight safe and protected even if the minute drain on her is negligible. Not like it sits out there weeping leaves and petals a la Beauty and the Beast, but instead has a spot tucked away from the windows where its saturated dusky luminescence goes unchallenged.

Running her free thumb along the mystical construct without disturbing its bearing, she pulls another four strands off the loop still linking their hands together, and stretches them out. As each piece is integrated into an infinity loop, the free wisps tease in brushstrokes over the scarred skin he so often conceals under sleeves, gloves, or simply from sight. Pale kisses fluff along, then she reaches to add another aerial cord to those already drawing his wrists close together. Flexibility applies here better than any rope could imagine, but the downside is the faintest tickle the more he compresses the wind bonds.

And given his range of sensory perception is blasted wide open, this could be telling. Has Strange’s _resistance_ likewise increased? To some degree, yes. The rest, he’ll have to discover for himself.

Reluctantly Wanda withdraws her hand from the bonds around them, though she takes that free end and spins out the long anchor strand to be tied into the celestine apparatus suspended a good thirty inches and more off the ground. Nothing stops its height from adjusting higher or lower, but it’s not too far off the ground. Yet.

“Sit.” A simple word. She gives him time to get comfortable on the cotton-spun airy currents and the moonlight, which is something like stepping into a warm tub of water, not too hot and prone still to a chill where cooler air moves over the surface. They ought to try a hot tub in the snow, idle thought. His clothes are not an issue, not in the least; buttons are easily undone, after all, and the dress shirt pushed open. Pants? Might as well accept once he’s settled, she’s going to vaporize them or, more likely, not quite so dramatic: peel them away with the wind itself and let the garments with their split seams fly away to land somewhere else on the platform.

 

One day, no doubt, he’ll come across that starlit rose, so carefully kept away from damaging sunlight, and smile so fondly. And then curl a smirk with all the pleasure of a cat in the cream. It was a good move, it was. 

Given that the Witch requires such focus to draw up the bands of his airy shackles, he’s able to close off the sight of it. Sure, there’s that lingering low level concern, but committing aloud to the act and knowing that it’s _her_ wiles that bind him makes it easier to accept. That and how the immediate sensation isn’t anything like he expected. Capture, to him, involves struggling against bonds one can’t break. As he blinks down at the infinity loop now encircling his wrists, there is no pain registered - just a faint tickling sensation that he needs must fight; majority success, only failing points seen in the twitching of his biceps. It tickles! Must not itch! Don’t forget those earlier kisses far lighter than snowflakes. Those most definitely left him with delicious goosebumps and a silent intake of breath.

She bids him sit and Strange shall. Experience makes him ready for the shifting of a hammock as he settles down in it, legs still hanging over the edge, booted toes barely touching the temple’s floor. Not this time. The ambient air around him is just warmer than his skin, but not so much that exertion might draw sweat. It’s decidedly comfortable, velvety around him, and he looks up at Wanda, bound hands sitting expectantly in his lap.

Dress pants and lightly-clenched fists do only so much to hide the Sorcerer’s overall opinion on the current standing of things. His tongue flicks out to wet his lower lip.

“Now what?”

He’s come out of the stupefying effects of her lips at the puckered scars. The glazed expression is much less intense, more alert though also...expectant. This is new, presenting himself in such a way, and so far, it hasn’t been terrible. It’s not like she’s stripped him and tickled him to tears. Bad idea, that, and yet such an amusing thought in passing.

The benefit of not using rope, at least that of a hemp variety, is that any parallels to a hammock completely end when Strange starts to settle in. For one, the web broadens and unfolds like origami, or a snowflake cut out from folded paper. Snips and incisions might give an impression of a pie wedge or triangle, but fully releasing the creases and seams reveals something with a great deal more structure than appears at first. That comes from the wending knots of the wind, the meanders distributed under a fully-grown adult’s weight pushing downwards on the belly of the moon.

Luminous anchor strands sparkle and dance, and the cushioning effect beneath him gives no sense of totally being suspended in space. The density for her handiwork is responsible for that; unlike lying against a roped patchwork full of open spaces for his body to press against and bulge through, the crisscrossed bits of wavering light and wind wobble until they make a neater, chaotic matrix.

Downside, he’s going to perpetually be moved about at an incremental level, even while completely stationary. Arching his back might leave little chance of flipping over onto his stomach, but still he’ll be left quivering and marginally afloat upon a bestirred current. Strange might have to compensate for not having even that vestige of control when walking the knife-edge of discipline, striving to maintain his composure when every damn element, including the natural ones, conspire to overthrow him to his own ecstatic hedonistic experience.

Nibbling on her formerly bitten cuticle, she hasn’t pierced the surface accidentally, but it is rather pink. Wanda sucks upon her fingertip after catching herself in the act and circles around Strange, eyeing up what remains to be adjusted. A tweak here, a tug there, and the pliable ‘material’ conforms better to his frame when she frees up a snarl or, in one case, adds another to put a comfortable pressure point right against his lower back. It’s not altogether unpleasant, allowing for a bit of a firmer spot to flex and press back against. Experience serves here, clearly.

Those webbed, errant strands focused around his ankles, though, they _aren’t_ light. No, using one of the moonflowering vines, she nudges the smooth greenery to clamber there and one of the glorious blossoms opens to provide a powdered sheen: not quite starlight, but full of the moon’s warming elixirs as nectar in its spread cupola of petals. The answer to the starlight rose, albeit borrowed, will slip away back to its proper spot in the garden, though it’s still proof positive of desire: the white flower leaves stained purple, sky-blue towards the outer edge of its bloom.

Where the nectar fell in mercurial drops on his pants, she makes short work of removing them, as promised: the wind cuts just as well, after she unbuttons his shirt and collar, exposing his chest to her. Standing between his feet, a few gestures assure the moonlight does what the flowering vines did before and fix his lower legs in place. Inspection can only follow, with clothes askew and her still totally clothed. Mostly. The coat goes, after a moment of contemplation, tossed carelessly behind her.

Time to taste the readiness of the goods, as it were, and a prize above all prizes. She bends to lean against him, her hands clasping his forearms, and there it is: her kiss pressed to the corner of his mouth, another on his jaw, and right back to the vampiric bite. Slow tracery repeated won’t speed up much, but he has the advantage of not being able to much resist the sensation of her buttery leather corset pressed to his chest, the converging vee of her arms, the dark rose blush of her perfume while she laps and kisses his neck lazily.

The sound from the back of his throat escapes him on the sharp exhale as one kiss leads to another leads to the return of the most terribly delightful sensation he’s felt at that scar site yet.

But rewind.

The weaving was far cleverer than he initially suspected, even in watching it. The simplicity gave way to not only an immeasurable comfort in reclining so mildly back within its cupping make, but a damnably inescapable inability to _cease_ the reminder that its strands support him.

The frisson of the night wind incising fabric from his skin is enough to cause a broken gasp. It leaves swathes of retreating chill-bumps in its wake that rapidly reheat in the bath-warmed air. He can’t help but stare helplessly at the dexterous fingers that also make short work of the button-down shirt and it reveals his torso that rises in deepening breaths, his attempt at composure made visible to all. Each release of button was enough to make his toes curl, his hands close tighter, the restless sensation in his gut to increase to a near maelstrom.

The bindings at his ankles, suspected to occur in lieu of the trending concept of Sorcerer bound, still present another novelty to him and cause him a swallow against dry mouth. He’s blushing out of conflict now, looking entirely too much like Wanda in those moments of private, triple-rated consideration: glazed of eye, lax of mouth, as if he’s not quite all there between his ears.

Oh, but he is, in torturous intensities of awareness.

And then she goes about inspecting him. That drag of lambent gaze from wind-mussed hair to toes causes a full-body shiver. The movement is collected and saved to memory within the moonweb itself, reflected back upon him at a level of intensity he just can’t ignore. Imagine the lowest setting of a TENS machine in tandem with the rush of a river’s surface against your skin, but not consistently, no more predictable than nature’s whims.

Poor bastard.

Not fair, not fair in the least how she so casually tosses aside her scarlet armor and reveals those lush curves that he’s not allowed to touch. He’s not drooling, he’s not, truly, believe him, but gods below, she looks luscious with the golden glow of her skin and the fall of her hair lit by star and moon alike. Why couldn’t she be one of the Zorya? He’d worship her all day - and night - and maybe around 2pm, after a nap.

The sleek slide of her lean - let’s face it, there was some sliding there, purely to make him suck in air and hold it for need to compile the vibrations it sends through him - leads to that first kiss. He tried to capture those lips with his own, but was summarily out-maneuvered by the arriving realization that she’s pinned his bound hands against his lower torso and her palms burn him to his bones there and the warmth is gliding up into his shoulders and if this is what heart palpitations feel like, he’ll gladly collapse to the floor anytime.

Okay, back to the live play.

The slick drag of her tongue against the marks elicits yet another groan that breaks against clenched teeth before being released fully on an exhale that quivers like a plucked string. He wants to freeze up for the over-blazing of the nerves at his neck, but can’t and so dissolves into another quaking moment.

The mantra starts with that quintessential tell of his, the muffled delight, and breaks into monosyllabic encouragements with each gasp:

“Mmmfff - yes, yes, yes, yes!” On it goes for as long as she lingers there, repetitive as the drumming of blood throughout his body, breaking in pitch a little more each time.

 

She would kiss him all day if the Vishanti would permit him, savouring every second from the moment their lips met in the morning to the hour they broke apart in the slumbering brought late into the night. So she will, carefully disengaging from a pointed nuzzle to his neck to leave him senseless to the spellbinding, his defenses overthrown as she imprints her existence upon the near fatal encounter with the Bride and then, the Enchantress.

Let the merest wisp of touch there bring back the memory of stars blazing with celestial fire overhead, and the tangible mingling of their scents, amber honey and black roses, sandalwood and a woodsy musk. When he borders upon senseless glories, let him know the way light dissolves into lazy cobweb trails upon hair artificially darkened black in this enchanted bower, bringing out the deepest ultramarine wash to his and silvering his temples and goatee such that those living lunargent sparks might be harvested for wealth greater than any Indian maharaja.

Redeeming his patience, her mouth seals over his for a lingering, desultory kiss that stretches well beyond the capacity of her lungs to hold breath. Oxygen pulled from his lungs in an insistent little drag equalizes the vacuum between them, and the daring interruption to answer her body’s natural requirements lasts only a second. She dives back into the experience of plundering his mouth, her tongue darting between his teeth as the foremost guardians. The questing tip flits along the ridges of his hard palate, dropping to duel with his own tongue, a meeting as much defined by embrace as thrust and divert.

A low purr melts against his captured lips, fading beyond the citrus threshold. Head tipped, she raises her left hand to cup his sharp, contoured jaw to allow little strain to his neck muscles. His skin warms to the temperature of hers, or perhaps it’s the other way around, the balefire beating in his chest displacing the barest hint of a nip cooling the mons Venus shaped to match the fine Gothic architecture of cheekbone and jaw.

Eventually she pulls back just a little to attest to his lambent gaze, and Wanda rubs her nose against his, almost daring him to chase her mouth that’s but a breath from his. The shallow breaths making her chest rise and fall within the burgundy caress of her damasked corset is even more distinct in that moment.

It feels easier to just settle into his lap, but that would make the present only an echo of its actual intent. Pulling herself together means withdrawing a step, her hands skimming down the plaque of buttons and drawing them wider to expose his chest further, the warm cream of his skin found by the moon almost instantly and those bonds capturing him as much as supporting him shine with their own ethereal luminosity reflected upon him now: opalescent, rather than iridescent as she is. Stars and the moon: there is no sun in this realm exclusive to them, and besides, moons are _gods_ in her culture, not _feminine_.

A step back allows her room to bend over him and deliberately swirl her tongue in the hollow of his throat, traipsing kisses in a herringbone down his sternum. When the bone ends, he’s had at least twelve of them placed, each hot as a brand pulled straight from the blacksmith’s fire. Eyes glittering faintly amethystine in a kohl frame look up to test his reaction, and wicked thing, the trumpet blossom scaffolding hums with the minute shot of mana pressed into it to energize every nexus rattled along his back and poised against hamstrings and calves, nestled in place.

Imagine being plugged into that TENS machine when the hum spiked up along all the chakras and several acupressure points besides, igniting them at once. Someone has been studying his texts very deeply for the past couple of weeks…

And what was she doing with that rope? _Guess_.

Strange’s predicament thrums with an attractive glimmer, putting him at the centre of the universe within their cosmic square. His position tilts forward slightly, endorsing the values of being suspended between the pillars of Dusk: he can watch all she does with the broadened capacity of a pure sensate, his body capable of enduring more of the teasing, but no doubt with an increased payoff to the end.

Her hands clasped behind her, the witch bends and captures his nipple between her teeth, lavishing upon him the hot circle of her lips another level of confinement. The pull of her cheeks draws the captive nub to the precipice of her teeth, and he’s roughly tongued until satisfactorily engorged to the point where relatively balmy air will send a shock through him. Repeating the process follows to the opposite side, not without a rush or a counterpoint.

Her hair lies across his pectoral muscles like a cloak, and long strands drag along the sensitive points. The forewarning of what she might be delivering on him: gentleness until he’s stirred up properly to smoldering and arching, learning how things can tickle without tickling, like a Wartenberg pinwheel slowly pricking down awakened nerves, nipping on a string of fine neurological stimuli. Call her dangerous to be entering the field of his expertise, especially with the doors of the mind blown wide open.

Still his legs bracket her, for all she must decide whether to stay upon her feet or pull the bench up, decisions unapologetically made in her own good damn time. Because the vision of him proceeding into the vaults of incarnadine lust demands appreciation, and grievances against hurried intercourse -- good as it can be -- keep her from progressing faster than she does. No, let him feel the rustle of leaves playing against his calves as the flowers answer their respective emotions, glittering bright and whisked away.

The next step begs to be measured carefully: he might anticipate her slipping down, but it’s not happening that way. Circling around Strange puts her outside of his peripheral vision for the most part and he might rather worry, except the scent of her is perfectly trackable; he knows her well enough, so how not? Ducking under one of the languid strands on the trumpeting headrest of the moon cradle, she leans in and the starweave shifts and pulls taut in places, holding him fast with some degree of freedom for him to writhe or strain away.

Behind him, she’s placed towards his right side, where her arm curls around his hip and follows the descending arc of his pubic bone. Long fingers slipped through the nectar of the nocturnal garden wrap around his heated length, stroking wordlessly until he stands hard as an iron bar and glistens to his own sight, an almost disembodied source of pleasure. Let that last for nearly a minute, the act of manually running him through a gauntlet of her curled fingers. She is hardly idle in this, learning those sensitive points by equal concentration and experimentation. Does her thumb flicking over his tip playfully elicit a response or would he rather her hand squeeze lightly? Can he withstand a gossamer thread of the wind fluttering almost out of reach, so that every unpredictable oscillation might just glance along his corona or brush under the ridge and sweep down?

He’s going to find out on the last as she teases the thinnest airy filament free and anchors it with a simple loop around the base of his shaft, nothing too constrictive or dire, but placed just so that the interference of her hand keeps Strange totally upon his toes. It’s another angle delivered by a sensate: who better to know how to walk the line? Her body radiates heat from directly behind him, and when she steps in, she practically curls against his side. All the better to hold him fast as she darts in to suck at his neck hungrily and continue her ministrations, stroking all the way til the plum crown is cradled against her thumb and wet index fingers. It’s an easy tempo to establish, faster down, slower up, gradually gaining a little constriction.

“Mine.” A word, before she nibbles back under his ear to that white-hot pair of scars likely bruised by the luxurious assaults of tongue, lips, teeth.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Doctor Strange surrenders to Scarlet Witch's seductions with creative use of moonbeams.

The sudden absence of her attentions at the twin scars that now burn with cold fire is harrowing. He didn’t know that he was leaning towards the delicious lips causing such crackling up into his scalp and down into his sternum and so does a quick realignment of his neck to center; this sends his hypersensitive inner ear to whirling in a most delicious dizziness and it is perfectly reasonable to assume him blitzed by celestial petals and sweet aromatic wood. Also, perfectly reasonable that hovering alone, in the sky, accompanied by the Cloak’s stoic presence, will bring him to shutter off his sight and inhale as silently as possible against a rush of goosebumps brought on by anything but the night air.

Why? Why is she retreating? Wordless entreaty is quickly silenced and purged in how he falls into the kiss she grants him. She tastes of femininity on a level that sings siren-like to every cell in his body, like soulsong and the arias of strings. Who cares if he can’t breathe? She can have all of him, all the air in his lungs, and she nearly does before breaking off. The Sorcerer also manages one attempt for air above the surface of the flood over his hyper-awareness before he drowns once again. Her hand at his jaw might as well pin him as easily as the wending constraints at wrists and ankles.

There was once a connotation made about entertaining an engagement with someone merely aware of their ability at a task or the creator of said Olympics. In a battle of Mystical Arts, he might win out of experience in dealing devastation. Here, in the realm of Buyan, as she duels between his lips, he is brought to his knees at her skill. Too slow, he’s too slow, she’s so slippery and he can’t _touch_ her, it’s terrible!

“Whu…?” It’s a sound of dazed surrender, puffed across the millimeters of space between bee stung lips, echoed in the hazy glow of his lilac-frosted eyes. She may as well have the rapier at his pulse point and be slowly drawing the tip down to part clothing.

Oh wait, she is, with fingers rather than keen blade, though his skin jumps at the gracing of her nails and drag of dress shirt as if teased with such an edge. He’s left to watch and despair at the parallels that ghost through his ramshackle mind. He used crimson silk, she uses the braided reflection of sunlight to prevent his interference in any manner.

He’s not smelling crisped skin, but he should be; his body tells him to twitch and he does against the gently-insistent molding of the moonweb even as he tries to keep still. It’s a Herculean effort against the conductive touch of the seating around him, especially as how each frisson roots its way into chakras and nerve bundles alike.

But Strange does, adjusting to the threshold of nerve conduction like the champ he always is, that indomitable stubborn streak bending but not breaking even in the face of nipples teased to pebbling in pin-point sparks. The left side feels to worm its way near to his heart and the pounding beat jumps a count higher yet.

She leaves him in this moment with torso curving outwards, presenting up that emblazoned sternum in an arch that leaves him shoving his skull back against the wispy moonweb base as hard as he can possible, straining his neck muscles to near-pain. Of course, any agony is quickly swiped away by the shocks that ripple through his body and replicate from crisscrossing rings. Fireworks explode against the back of his eyelids and it takes him precious seconds to realize that the balmy air is cooler for her absence. Blinking slowly at the temple he can now see instead of her ensorcelling presence, he has perhaps another second or so to consider the cocooning shifting of the cradle around him before searing liquid heat places one, two, threefourfive fingertips that glide down the exquisitely sensitive valley between hip bone and ridged abdominals.

He watches with the look of the condemned, albeit with the glazing of one so very lost in lust that there’s no return at this point beyond reaching release.

Oh gods, no, no -- adrenaline slows it all down, her slickened encroachment on his throbbing length -- she can’t, he can’t -- his eyelids flutter in helpless reaction, jaw slung open -- he won’t --

“ _Ungh_!” The forced exhale is followed by a ragged inhalation and he flounders. At his wrists, the bonds don’t necessarily tighten, but they don’t give; rather, they caress like velvet-sheathed knife-points at the nerves there and cause his arm muscles to stand to attention. His ribs can’t expand enough for the air he needs, can’t collapse fast enough to force the sounds that shred up his throat. The sight of her hand alone, disconnected from her body, is a wet dream incarnate, whispered wishes of any as swamped with hormones as he is, and there is no helping the analogy of the glistening on his superheated skin. She clutches as she would, with a different friction due to bunched skin of her palm, and he can tell, at a _very_ far distance, that she’s experimenting.

It’s like that one time, in the Loft, with the chair and the fireplace and oh my god, STOP THINKING ABOUT THAT, man, have some spine! Said bony architecture is subjected to immediate wattage as her thumb drags across the plumy bell and catches at the frenulum to its six-o-clock. The introduction of the loop about the thick circumference of his shaft is subtle enough that its immediate effect isn’t noticed until the faint sensation of a sumptuous bruise occurs. Slosh, slip, slide, gods below, when she tightens the ring of her first finger and thumb and drags it, he is subjected to pleasure so delicious that it reaches the point of pain. His world shrinks to the supernova he’s experiencing between his hips; the cords of his leg muscles thrum in strain against their bindings. She draws him up with fisted grip, his hips unerringly follow and hang for a beat until the return to base encourages him to settle back once again.

He can’t move enough; his entire body is set afire by her. When she strikes home at the scar marks at his neck, his pleasure centers roar as if injected with nitrous. He is close to nerve overloading, nearly entirely a creature of reaction as she surely wishes of him. What more can he stand?

The thinnest resilient strand of self-control stretches thinner and thinner still to keep himself at this edge, his own willful nature playing beautifully into her need to dance said merry line.

His ecstatic reverie is far beyond what Wanda might have hoped for, the visions of a fevered mind contemplating ways to unleash the essential masculine vigor coming to their own sumptuous fruition. Some tiny corner of her mind rebels in shock; the remainder not focused upon the task at hand positively basks in the solar prominence of Strange’s desire, his efforts to maintain an equilibrium on a broader scale than either of them have been much subjected to.

She _did_ promise him a new experience, one like no other, and something he -- and she -- had not done before. One can only hope the sorceress is as good as her word when it comes to matters between herself and her consort. Beloved. Sorcerer Supreme.

Whereas before the tangible affections laid upon his bared throat had a restrained, uncertain way about them, he is subjected to a very different experience this time around. The search for comfort in the thrilling familiarity of his dark, woodsy scent when at a far low discovered a fresh vein then: his offering for this. On the second quarter, things advance in a much different fashion. Her fingers slide away from his shoulder and he can trace their advance along his chest, paralleling the route taken by her tongue when she zeroed in expertly upon his nipples and now, their visit coincides with a pinch here, a tug there, sharp when the insistent drag of her tongue down the scarred grooves is implicit in its softness. Pulling him in opposite directions may be further shearing him asunder, and let it be said her gaze remains alert to the merest sign of duress.

He has given her such considerations in the past, he can consider always that remains at the forefront of her mind. All the same, the harpist’s fingers with their distinctive calluses bear down again, rolling and plucking with the skill she can tease out a lively sprint on the Celtic harp’s strings, until he fair to writhes under the attention. Such is the point, after all, to send a surge of scarlet heat radiating through his upper body to match that below.

He’ll certainly note that her fist never ceases to move, only altering the angle and pressure, allowing him to slip away rather loosely for one or two strokes. The next are delivered with profoundly different sensations, her palm cupping him through the slightly too tight ring of her fingers, milking out the moment with a delicious ease. In no small part the occasional dip into the cup of the night blooms allows their gathering pearled nectar to flood down across her fingers, renewing the lubrication, since no other ready supply is there for her to avail herself of. Aside from the wellspring between her clamped thighs, naturally, but this isn’t about her.

Instead he’s the subject of all cares, and a tentative exploratory nibble follows between wringing out the firework sparkles of a pinch and the cooling, gentle rub of her palm on his chest and the steady, even pace delivered in long strokes rather than frenetic, shorter ones to push him over. He’s likewise the recipient of her steady press into his suspended body, bound as it is to dance, nestled close against his right aside and an assuring presence as much as she can be while calculating how best to dismantle him as he so skillfully ruins her. The occasion calls for a few salvos.

Next, the tenderest nip to his ear, her teeth scoring a faint impression almost above the scar tissue, where one lamprey kiss after another leaves her mark for the hours to come. The tempo arresting him in her hand kicks up a notch, quicker, tuned to a musician’s sense of pace. “You look so very good right now, Stephen. I can only imagine how badly you might wish my mouth wrapped around you in place of my fingers.” 

Alas, those wanton lips are tracing over his goatee instead, marching for the corner of his mouth to impress a kiss there, assure him that the merest turn of his head can net that punctuated statement instead. If he dares to groan or growl at her at any time, she’s on him like a hawk to a mouse, passionately arresting that precious sound and offering whatever he might wish: to bite at her lips or capture her tongue or be drowned in the impudent depth of a French kiss meant to leave him mildly breathless. Turns out he’s very good at stirring such longing for them in his consort. Very good indeed.

Her thumb runs lazy circles around the great veins keeping him so engorged, the wind lasso serving its purpose admirably in a counterpoint that flickers and laps in the ghostly echo of what her tongue’s already been established to do much better, at least for broader strokes. The whole point of feathering another thin strip of the breeze untangled from the moon cradle is to let that flit playfully across the expanse of his thighs and as far as his navel, albeit the concentration being far more localized given wind’s tendency to curl and roll.

That done, his neck is suckled upon, nibbled and traced over firmly, and for every bite there are at least three to four seconds longer of attentive hunger-pang kisses lavished high and low. She can’t help herself from perching there a little longer, seeing if he speaks -- wordless or not -- to a given need, something else to fold into the experience. Mostly. 

“Do you want me to lap up every last centimeter until you’re pouring out your cream over my tongue?” When one focuses, linguistic differences aren’t _impossible_. The whisper in his ear is met with a very deliberate swipe of her tongue along the conch. Someone’s starved, doing all this.

 

The Sorcerer will probably fear any statement from her regarding follow-through on any intentions with a delicious frisson to boot. Her adherence to her word is akin to his and that ardent sincerity is currently taking him apart.

Bruises never felt so good. Putting on any sort of shirt will remind him for days of how she made his pectorals jump like startled game at her pouncing twists. Silk will be a torment to wear, even the highest weave of cotton worse still. Any drag of her nails shows reddened on his skin, pearly to the Sight.

The loosening of her slippery gripping breaks his next sigh against his teeth and he emerges from behind tightly-scrunched lashes to flash lust-drugged amaranthine eyes down towards the wrong-doer. Crisis averted, amended, thrice over, with how the tightness mimicking a particular muscular ring molds his plumped shaft and he throws back his head to stare wordlessly at the domed ceiling.

Oh gods, oh gods, damn it all, he won’t -- he won’t make it if she keeps this up.

The nipping at the scarring serves to pull him back from a plateau, but not in a bad way. It’s a simple reminder of her presence that blends effortlessly into the general miasma of pleasure she weaves around and through him. The steadying pace is as welcomed as it is damning. The predictable ratcheting allows his scrambled brain to briefly rally.

“Mmmfff…!” Clear sign of success at the nip; it jolts him in her grasp, surely she feels the rush of blood beneath her nectar-smoothed palm. There is no hesitation on his part to continue offering up the lovingly abused skin to her questing lips.

But then, the conductor shifts the conduit into the next gear. The increase in speed, in combination with her veiled suggestion, blinds him momentarily. His pupils blow full-wide and the ambient light of the moonweb sears retinas even as it keeps him from wriggling free. A pulse of his own dew joins the nectar slicking him and betrays him utterly. Logic has no bearing in it, only base passion.

The Sorcerer is nearing the point where he has no feedback to give but what his body wishes of him. Everything just feels so _good_ , what’s the point in resisting? He’s too slack-jawed to offer any kiss back to her, not with how the tickling of her lips at his finely-trimmed facial hair simultaneously draws and repels, familiarity warring with over-exposed nerves; it leaves him at impasse. The wind at odds with her knuckling pace pulls him closer to that edge still.

Clearly, she means to destroy him. Between his legs, the sack of ultra-sensitive skin has tucked nearly to its base mounting, their tightness an indicator of hand grenades -- pull the pin, watch him blow. The ghosting brush of the moon-strand is the perfect counter to her touch. Pray it doesn’t shift below the upper plane of his thighs and navel; all that twitches at the passing touch as if fly-stung.

Still breathing like a race horse, ribs heaving, though there seems to be another plateau here in blustering gasps and frantic audible swallows. Amazingly enough, she’s reached the point where the scar marks react like any other point on his body. Bride’s blight erased? The final key might be in turning the lock and allowing him fulfillment. He burrs some mangled sound at the back of his throat amid one of the laving attacks to suckled skin. It’s a failure in attempted verbal communication, so he blinks a few times and tries again.

“Wah -- ” 

_Flatliiiiiiiiiiiiiiine. Beeeeeeep_. Prime the paddles, staunch the nosebleed, wipe the grey matter from the walls.

A full-body palpation of sorts beneath her hands and lips and whispered words with implications beyond the restrictions of linguistics and word choice. He doesn’t have anything clever to say anyways beyond a shuddering sigh in the upper register of his voice -- so pleading somehow, despairing probably at the level of intensity of sheer _want_.

Beneath her glazing fisting, he firmly jumps and beads once more.

There is cruelty and compassion, tenderness and travail. All of them coexist in the moment she steps away from him, always within the range of sight, flowing alongside those anchor points as she dips to avoid one barely visible shaft of moonlight and then lifts her foot to step over the other connected to the porphyry structure upholding a nigh invisible dome. It puts her back where they started from; Wanda between the sorcerer’s shadow and the vision of gardens bathed in starfire as her backdrop.

For about three seconds, maybe four, her hand leaves him. Not much longer than that, though, sparing him the tribulation of being driven up to a precipice over and over, until he is too insensate to endure its demands and falls into the molten currents of himself. Enough to ease away, for she needs that. It probably won’t last beyond a second or two, if he has the right of himself.

First, the skirt drops, pushed down her hips and left to slither past the widest part of her thighs. A good nudge sends it falling away, raven dark puddle left behind the long-legged woman walking towards him with promise in her eyes. Leggings are a bother, those take more effort to push down and in doing so, she’s briefly eye to eye with the object of her eternal affections. Fingers curl lightly around him short of the engorged head, and without a word, she pops her lips around it, tasting all he has to offer at that precise moment and no more. Absolution takes a second and no further, another shove closer to redemption and release. But not enough by half. Enough to lace the taste of him over her lips. Enough to learn by an older sense than sight what she has done, the progress taken by another less than scientific means.

But by then, her other hand has tugged those leggings to her knees, and she can step out of them easily enough, one foot after the other. All within his scope of view, and the panties are sent falling afterwards a heartbeat and a tug of elastic later. Suitable. Still corseted, but freed up.

Three or four tugs on the celestial cradle rock him precipitously backwards so the dome gives a fine roof to the world, though his head is still higher than his feet. A good thing, really, considering once the thrumming vibrations stabilize some, he has another issue to contend with. Additional weight tests the strength of the elemental web; Strange is the point at which she throws her leg over his waist and stretches out, clinging hold to the matrix and hoisting herself up as though she’s riding a horse… backwards, from his point of view.

Not her favourite -- being denied his expressions, eye-to-eye contact, the silent collusion of souls -- and possibly not his, but essential for the next act of pleasure. She slides back carefully, catching her feet in the netting, but careful not to get impossibly tangled up. The weight of her body settles over his stomach, her breasts trapped between them, knees sliding right back to parallel the pits of his arms and probably no further given the wide splay necessary to accommodate his hands trapped between them. She wiggles back until his fingers are trapped against the gentle, somewhat flattened swells for warmth, and once positioned comfortably, she lies atop his bound hands.

Very little space separates them, the slightest elevation of her hips following the rise of her tailbone and weight balanced on her knees so, in theory, Strange can still breathe. Though the merest adjustment might allow him to taste the dusky rose petals liberally soaked in honeyed nectar, giving little strain to his neck to do so. He’s well positioned to watch every pang flood through her, contracting the moon-gleamed rim of her entrance, the pouting folds awash in a lunar dew from his point of view.

He might never notice. The world of sensation exploding outwards from his oversensitive, throbbing phallus erupts when she pops him back between her lips, and with one stifled purr, finally avails herself of swallowing him deeply. Artifice is out the door. He slides over her tongue, teeth lending a lemony zest in an occasional light scrape, and the crown lodges in the perfect hollow at the roof of her mouth. Purring and rolling him along the ridges, she spends a few moments doing no more than suckling his essence away and feeling the heady pulse. There are consolations to that sudden shock of heat engulfing him. Enjoy the sensation of her tongue wrapped around him, lips sealed tight in a much firmer, truer ring than her fingers can attain by compare. Her fingertips skim lower to trace the flickering ring of the wind, and tenderly angle him to reach deeper when she bobs to swallow him deeper, skating lower until her lips press flat above the sack and her tongue barely flickers. A ghost of motion, a hint of wet heat.

The muffled reverb of his name is sung as much as whispered, somewhere in the sultry darkness of night.

Ah, the haves and the have nots. Apparently, he is lumped into the latter category as that hand disengages and pulls another wispy whimper from his lips. Chapped and stinging still with the memories of her plundering, he licks at them as he desperately watches her make her way with deliberate grace around.

He’s to the point of continual vibration, muted but noticeable if one looks closely enough and of course the hammock returns the favor. The decision to not succumb to the borderline-tickling of his bower rests on the tensile strength of that resilient remaining strand of self-control. A-flame, every inch of him, and his body reacts accordingly to the disappearing act by skirt with a helpless bobble of both shaft and Adam’s apple alike.

So this is how the rabbit feels as the predator glides closer; hawk, snake, cat - no matter, the intent read in those amber eyes is predatory and he can’t help the quiver that radiates from his bones, exchanges cooler foreboding for snapping heat that reignites the places feeling so bruised and needy. She means to prey upon him, eat him up, in one way or another, he can sense it on an instinctive primal level. The fall of leggings and undergarments alike confirm it, though he’s not present to see them fall, not after the brief sealing of her mouth around his bell end.

When the starbursts clear from his vision, he realizes that his world has shifted; his inner ear is so slow to catch up and oh, alright, the ceiling. Lying back, more of his back pressed flat to the ever-shifting surface of the moonweb and he wiggles like a bear attempting to scratch an itch that will never cease.

Ever the gentleman (or less savory, the enabler?), he realizes that he may be treated to the hourglass shape of her body from behind rather than frontally and tries moving his bound hands up and out of the way. Gods above, gods below, he wants it, he _needs_ it, hurry already -- the impatience appears as a purling groan from behind bared teeth followed by another increase in galloping heartbeat. Trapped hands now, bound and sealed between her velvety swells, denied even the luxury of returning the earlier favoring of his own nipples. Torment!

Still, the view is enough to cause him to melt back further into the hammock, with its teasing embrace. She smells of primal femininity, oud de blackest roses, honey-tart sweetness, and honestly, he _is_ leaning up with questing tongue to sample the hanging droplet of the nearest fold. She radiates heat like a furnace and --

“WAN-DUNNNGGGHH!”

Thank the gods that he doesn’t bite flesh off with how hard his teeth audibly clack together at the initial assault. No worries, ivory closed nowhere near the sopping creases of roseate skin. She is a rider-extraordinaire to stay atop him as his entire body convulsively arches and shudders beneath her. Hopefully the upwards thrust of his hips doesn’t hurt her; he couldn’t help it any more than the need to cough and gulp for air and sound like he’s choking on his own tongue. As if hooked up directly to a battery, he writhes madly, attempting solace in fighting the bonds at his ankles wildly. The wriggling of his fingers might feel good to her, so trapped between her breasts.

Then the broken whispering begins, blatantly signaling that disorienting fall into the heat of her mouth that slakes both alike.

“Wanda, Wanda, _I can’t_ , Wanda, please, _oh gods_ , please, _Wanda,_ _please_!”

Can’t handle it anymore. There’s the sense of a _snap_ and his sanity unravels as she takes him to the hilt.

His eyes roll back into his head, which is probably a safe idea given the entire world around him is swirling in disorienting watercolor-melt as one sense gives way entirely to the onslaught. Akin to the sucking undertow of an encroaching wave, all he can do is pray her name and pray for the looming release to crash into him and wash him insensate onto a moonlit shore.

T-minus 15 seconds.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The best presents give something in return.

The cries of her name turned ragged and sharp spur no change in the evolution of Strange’s demise. Why mess with his perfected destruction? If experience teaches the cruelest of taskmistresses anything, it is not to change at the last moments what she did in the runup to a glittering zenith.

Fifteen seconds involves treading the very essence of sultry summer night locked in her throat, plumbing the threshold of the impossible. Guided by the buck of his hips, she requires no further hint of what must be done. Air swallowed into fluttering lungs a lifetime ago plays out to sustain her; no turning back now, he is the focus and centre of all existence. Fingertips maintain their vigil, sentries spread in an arrangement of eight fanned points arrayed along feverish and impossibly sensitive skin as the grenade pin is not only plucked but vaporized for good measure. Her thumbs rotate in the gentlest knead, occasionally lending a counterpoint to the main event.

Which he responds to faster, the vacuum suction dragged against the entirety of his thickened length or the much-reduced flutter of her tongue, matters not. She drags back only for a moment to about halfway, another fleeting breath accompanied by the biological wonder of synchronized action in a swallow that engages silken inner cheeks, narrowing esophageal muscles, throat, roof of her mouth. One dive seems to last forever in her own implicit eruption of fireworks in a gas filled plume of volcanic nightfall, until the bell-tip lodges as deep as it can damn near go.

Worry about the essentials of extraction and breathing later. Certainly, she does, uttering one of those primordial moans that will never be heard, only felt, throwing one more straw upon the poor man’s spine.

Not as though her body ceases to flow with every attempt to buck it off, a matter of pride and, more notably, instinctive duress now. He isn’t shocked by the low-grade hum of the moonbeams and airy strands, though one or two will snap and flow off into the night in all their flexion. The majority hold, anchored by the resolute perfection of the Pillars of Dusk, and his cries are made to the tender inner curve of her thigh or the velvet underbelly of the shadow-lit nymphaeum. At least there is some smile of Lady Luck to look upon in another sense, all that writhing lodging his hands against the crown of her breast.

If that were not electric enough, it has something to do with another muffled, frantic cry spontaneously poured out on him. Should it be between hurried, thirsting gulps, all the better, but they exist in one space and time, his lead to the brink followed faithfully as the stalwart cloak floating about, probably wondering what all the fuss is about, and the nectar spilled on its master being difficult to get out of his goatee with a spot treatment.

It probably needn’t worry obsessively, for the witch chases the sorcerer’s ultimate demise for his own good, and she does not -- and will not -- halt until the last beaded drop is hers. Mark of precise need, there, something ingrained in her very being. (“ _This delicious nectar is mine, and more, please. Mmmf._ ”) Should he flatline properly, it’s with her arms curled gently around his upper thighs and backside, dark hair feathering against the slickness of his skin, nestled in a lunar bower with an amber tawny blanket thrown over him to assure his dignity and welfare are seen to. She may cease to move, but she won’t disengage.

He can’t -- he just _can’t_ \-- it’s too much and his blood roars in his ears with the thunder of the distant waves as the chest-deep moan radiates through him like a bell.

Straw, camel’s back, broken.

Said back locks into a quivering bow as it fails to conduct the explosive zipping flare of starfire that vaporizes all nerve endings in its dooming path from scalp to scrotum.

Vertigo lends its own touch to the maelstrom suffusing his hips. He falls _up_ rather than down, does some sort of mental barrel-roll, shedding shreds of sanity in its wake, and she receives all the Sorcerer’s essence -- every last drop.

The release coincides with a shattered shouting moan forced from his lungs by constriction of all muscles in his body and each successive quivering jilt of his hips pulls him downwards farther -- and farther -- and farther -- down that rabbit hole to some darkness desperately needed by a system flashing red with use and delicious abuse.

A full 30 more seconds, the epic cataclysm takes from radiant explosion to inwards collapse.

Slump. The moon webbing catches the boneless Sorcerer back into its safety and there he lies upon his moonstone shore, washed upon it like some castaway from the depths of sweet tropical water’s ecstatic embrace, breathing but very clearly unconscious.

Will it terrorize him to know a bottle of _aqua vitae_ rests in the cabinets of their bedroom, a cool, dark place where the recuperative properties endure longer from the spring at Buyan? Or will Strange discover that bottle with a frisson of blazing desire and drink to his warbling, lusciously ripe beloved while awe and despair flash in her lust-glazed eyes, and she mouths his name in a prayer? The same braided red ribbon lies around its neck as the sole testament to its origins, and they might drink again from the fresh, bubbling river so few paces away from them.

Thirty seconds for her to drink her fill, finally pulling back a little to allow air to make it down her windpipe before she drowns herself in his essence again. The shattering cry still echoes through her skull and into the night shrouding Buyan, a prayer to honour the Zoryas, his triumphant capitulation to a halcyon ascendancy causing a mutual shudder to run down her curved spine.

Sublime, the way he claims the moist refuge in her mouth and surrenders to the tight webbing that constricts his legs and supports his back with every harrowed flex and buck. No motion is so violent that embrace cannot compensate, and when he goes slack in the afterglow of supernova, space conforms to hold his lead-heavy limbs and the prostrate sprawl of his body. It still minutely rolls to the celestial chorus played by the heavenly bodies on low and on high.

Wetness drips from some of the lunar beams, a slickness that drips off his goatee and dries in a lacework collar across his throat. He’s left her dripping and unfulfilled, at least in a mutual sense, and the whispers of feminine slickness painted in dark nectar and creamy musk rose whenever he captures its faint traces. Yet to the masculine brain, that scent nails hard upon the hidden psyche, buried deep into the portions of the brain hardwired to respond to his beloved, and name himself the source of that pleasure.

Smug bastard, even subconsciously.

She rests against him for the better part of two or three minutes, catching her breath and allowing him to rest in the submarine umbral dimension of the mind. Renewal there is faster than jolting awake at seventy miles an hour, and in the meantime, desultory licks and kisses to his hardened shaft assure no inch goes unexplored by soft lips and warm tongue. Every angle of him is left glistening clean and stroked by her fingers, mindful of lingering sensitivity. Eventually after a lifetime, the brunette sits up, disheveled but satisfied, and repositions herself first before worrying about him.

Being slightly more upright when he finally comes conscious, or starts to ascend from the abyss, Strange rests against the luminous web of crushed flower petals, moonbeams, and the wind. A little water dapples his lips, secured from the cup of the night plant, which tastes a little of a kiss of fruit -- something more like apricot, though very faint, cut by _aqua vitae_. Just enough to remove the possible bruising of their kisses, a sufficient taste to soothe rather than invigorate. She nestles atop him, her legs around his waist and feet hanging to the sides of that crescent moon swing.

His face is held between her palms, and she descends to fill his vision, kissing his temples and his brow, feverish rose petal cascades of tenderness that utterly defy the liquid puddled across his navel to drip off his scrotum, faint trails left where she has persistently kept moving to nature’s demand that she roll her hips and rock against him. Rather than bury him in her, though, the intimacy with its note of frustrated, pent-up pleasure is painted upon his canvas in the most literal sense.

Nuzzling his neck over the scars is hard, kissing him easier. “Stephen,” she whispers for the eighth or ninth time, suckling his lower lip and tugging lightly. “ _Love_ … please. Come back. I need you.”

If the terror is equal parts scalding memory, mental and muscle alike, in combination with the realization of the sheer magnitude of potential, said reaction is guaranteed. In the same manner an addict might discover a hidden stash and carefully close off sight of the addictive element, he might shut the doors and take a deep, centering breath to combat the initial dizzying wave of acknowledgment. Of course, situation dependent, he might then go locate the nearest shot glass, down a glittering glass of liquid starlight, and then hunt down his Beloved with all the tender passion of a Southern thunderstorm; muggy heat and lightning and rolls of thunder in his wake.

Take a guess.

It’s a slow, deep, and dark place where he’s at, but not in a sense where the soul shivers and shrinks. Just relaxation, the breath of peace, and the bubbles of thought that rise through the molasses of the Sorcerer’s mind. Out like a light, none before his eyes, but something slips through the runnels left by rising reflections and it just so happens to be that musk solidifying well within range of each comatose inhalation. This concept has been utilized before, when his mind was not his own, and it happens once again to be the smelling salts for pulling him up from the depths.

From the morass of blissful rest he rises, following the scent trail like a shark on blood, and when he breaks the surface of consciousness, it’s to the feeling of warm hands framing each cheekbone. Sound processing follows shortly after and the garbled buzzing becomes a sweetly mellow entreating of his name in a mezzo-soprano he could pick out amidst millions. A marked inspire is the biggest tell followed by the briefest flutter of lashes. Then his lids rise, revealing pupils still blown coin-wide by _all_ her presence.

“Wanda…?” The name is breathed towards her, flowering against her pouting lips. He licks the shelf of his own blushed skin tasting apricot first before catching the edge of his goatee. Immediately, the taste of her nectar digs jealous talons into his hindbrain with full force and elicits a mildly-intense writhing beneath her.

_Now_ he begins to actively process the scene before him and its ramifications. She straddles him frontally; his bound hands remain resting on his abdominal plane, fingers bent inwards interlaced to press knuckles against the eternally-soft and hairless flesh above the apex of her folds. He can feel the stickiness of her natural juices beneath the outer lines of his hand, where it puddles and then sensually drips around and down further. The look in those eyes, as he holds them, is not one of repletion.

Oh gods, she didn’t...she never reach her fulfillment. He swallows and whispers in that same dizzy voice of a dreamer,

“Use me, Beloved. I’m... somehow, still ready.”

Seems his brain hasn’t quite processed the refractory period yet. Miracles can happen!


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Happy endings come from the very best gifts.

Walk a mile in his shoes and Wanda might experience the same shell-shocked state of amazement, and somehow be capable of murmuring invitation to him through the breathiest of voices. His very tone, so deeply relieved, wallowing in comforts, strikes deep to some vein of the conscious collection of thoughts she never even knew existed. Torn in twain by the need to nurture his slow rise into the balmy climes of conscious thought and the vibrating torments of a dam sundered, at the first she holds as she is.

Stillness isn’t in the cards, naturally, but quivering while nestled against her favourite spot in the multiverse, atop (or under, if anyone really thought to ask) Strange without a definite plan or care, is about the best the witch can muster. Her hips flex in a deliberate, decadent shift as she stretches out, her hands meshed amongst the glowing strands of his hair catching the moonlight. No severe tug follows, only her nails running over his scalp, guided by fingers deftly adding the most tangible of caresses. 

“You are sure?” A question within a question, a look as soul-deep as one can give while watching emotion trickle back into his face and animate the features once slack in the rigors and bliss of sleepless oblivion. There’s reason Greeks believed Death was brother to Sleep and Dream, son of Love and Night. He is in safe hands for the moment, for she refuses to advantage herself quite yet.

  
His fingers nonetheless are caught in limbo, the press of her folds kissing his knuckles and adding the muted balm upon the scarred tissue, a lotion rubbed in by the endless fickle rotations of her hips trying to match the wind’s dance. The wind never whimpered through bitten lips. It didn’t ever radiate sirocco heat under a dreamer’s sky to the merest curl of a fingertip, the promise of a caress that might unlock the trembling knotwork to set her free.

Just not right yet.

Encouragement isn’t an argument; a matter not open for debate. If he says yes, then she moves. If not, then her movements are forestalled for a different end.

Slowly she retreats and slides against him, running her hands back down his shoulders and converging to a point on his chest that runs parallel to his navel, slipping further down when she sits up. Free the bindings or leave them? The question goes unspoken in those fathomless sunset eyes, and she locks her heels into the stirrups of entangled moon silk lines, stretching up a little further. Rising clears a bit of space between her taut thighs, and speaks a promise as old as time.

If he could purr under the goosebump-inducing scratch of her nails along his scalp, he would. He’s left with groaning softly in the back of his throat, relaxing farther back into the stiffened hammock, somehow entertaining the fact that he himself is so stiff after dealing with what felt like a life-ending event. Sumptuous -- decadent -- ecstasy.

Her inquiry is a bit novel and he blinks slowly at her, his brain still thrumming back into full-tilt speed. It isn’t that his nerves are numbed to the frissons she causes in the hammocks with her eternally-shifting movements of hips against his knuckles -- oh no, he feels those just fine, it’s just processed with a mind towards past experience and a readiness for potential spikes in sensory conduction.

“I wouldn’t offer if I wasn’t interested,” the Sorcerer reminds her with a bit of a slurring burr to the words. Make no mistake, he’s nearly all there, just still mired in the solar glow of the past orgasm. Natural fatigue is fighting a war against the sparkling zest of the Aqua Vitae; this is the last stumbling block to full-functional reason. “Don’t worry, Beloved, you look like you need it.” A breathy laugh as that dry humor of his breaks through.

The slide of her hands is enough to turn that last laugh into an abrupt gasp as it reignites zings of heat. He licks his lips again and swallows, managing to whisper, “No, leave them unless you need them.” Them being bonds and them being his hands. The pause in her movements is implicit and the recognition of a recently-visited high being a likelihood is more than enough to cement his feelings on the matter.

“Yessss…” he hisses, eyes slowly drawing up from the shadowy vee of her thighs, up the length of her sun-glow body, and to her face, with its plump lips and lambent glowing eyes. If words won’t suffice, hopefully the look he gives her does.

She might bring the dragon low with water and wiles, but where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Now it’s her turn to be relatively incapable of stringing together six words, reduced to near monosyllables and intently drawn to the aborted cause. Plans refiled: oh gods, how _badly_ she needs release. And when, not in moments past but the uneven build means that the stalled climax might be compressed into several peaks pressed up against one another, akin to shoving mountains into a series of slanted ridges like the Flatirons.

Wanda bites her lip hard as another diversion, one that ceases to deter her from a continued ascent. A shoddy failsafe causes her to rock against him, her fingers curling around his forearms, giving enough leverage for the blind search he can perform all the more easily. Who has the advantage on seeing his length finally buried within her, the man with the clear view and limited leverage or the blind witch hardly limited in her mobility? The slap against her slick mound when she rocks too far back and low is almost accidental.

Except for that sharp smile briefly witnessed, the harsh intake of breath when their duel slides him straight up the fissure between those petals and bumping against her taut pearl, one sinuous movement causing her to spontaneously writhe atop him. Might be worth the miss, just to end up witness to the sudden intake of breath and the fluttering of lashes around empty eyes rolling back slightly.

Just _how_ long was he out, and how long is the high she’s been riding? Long enough to give no quarter. Long enough that her usual propensity to draw things out is completely absent, and the furtive -- if genuine -- fumbling of a distracted twenty-something become a hunting game wherein prey, him, is brought to ground by the ingenious corkscrewing of her hips until he slides back, and her little timed hop has the happy outcome of catching him at just the right vertical angle instead of missing an agile if stiffened target.

For him, it’s the difference between her plying the seduction of the body by caressing herself and digging her nails into his forearm, glancing down between her legs now and then, and finally sliding home with one fast descent that jettisons all sense. One second, she is empty. The next, he’s almost fully within, the savagery and the speed a thing to behold, even as the toe-curling pangs rock her forward and back. Dark hair spills along his chest, dashes up his cheek. One stroke ought to slay the girl, and she isn’t capable of holding back the sound rent through her teeth sunken into that poor bruised lip.

“ _Annnfff!_ ”

Was that quiet? No. Rapidly panting doesn’t help to relieve the implicit need seared red-hot through her veins: _fuck_.

His irises give off literal light now as he watches her intently. His turn to be predator, even if firmly netted by braided wind and web and Witch. Each mis-slip, deliberate or not, is enough to cause him to hiss in reverse, sucking in air through teeth partially by mouth parted by returning sensations.

Now it’s a new challenge to him. He knows the limits of his own body, what her movements will continue to cause in the moon webbing beneath him and extract from hormone-saturated muscles beneath his jumping skin. This miss is worth it, thousands of times over; smug bastard, whose lips curl slowly at the momentary slackening of her expression. _Again_ , he wills silently, not enacting his powers on anything in the least -- just wishing. Does she know how primally beautiful she is in those moments? If only she could see herself.

Hmm, idea.

Lady Luck might have graced the moment where slip becomes impale -- or maybe Buyan heard his testosterone-fueled musings and twisted reality _just_ right. The crescent diggings of her nails into his forearms blaze in pleasurable-pain; the agony is immediately lost to the surf crashing into him once more, knocking his feet out from under him.

His growling sound of verbal assent might be lost beneath her clarion cry, stifled as it is, the rumblings vibrating his ribcage in a manner impossible on Earth proper, and the little upwards jilt of his hips to further her demise is a good indicator of encouragement. 

“More, Beloved? Take it.” Ooh, there was some heated encouragement in that tone, a thrill of spice, a taste of challenge. Even as he too tries for enough air, the dual-worded sentences broken by gasp, those eyes might meet hers with a metaphysical blow of intensity. 

Please, by all means, continue riding him off into the sunset. She has the reins after all, hammock and bindings a worthy bridle. Let her buck.

Throw cesium into a bucket of water, the explosion might leave a crater deep and wide in the impact point. Fling a pair of lovers into the enchanted gardens at the Pillars of Dusk, where the Mother of Rivers rises to the surface and feeds leylines -- so they say -- that wander into the world, and what might happen?

Plants already reflect their respective emotional states and the cereus blooms add their heady fragrance to jasmine and night-flowering nicotiana, primrose, and other species so rare their names are but metaphors. Those glistening blossoms stretch petals to the star-studded sky, tasting the glittering points of distant fire risen over the horizon in full cosmic resplendence once the Court of the Three Zoryas assembles in its finery. Here, the nebulous gases around the Pleiades, there the strange configuration of Orion the Hunter, and more sparks dance on the respective columns Strange is bound to.

Sacrifices needed to support the lambent elemental weave come from the witch, who fed in her mana, and the inherent magic of the place itself. Hence there is no threat of their bower invaded by an untoward knot or the cessation of a spell, and nothing is more resilient than light in the darkness of an evening’s tide, nothing more flexible and adaptable than the sea-charged breeze tacked fast by a few cunning knots. In short?

Strange is screwed.

A few moments needed to regather her wits keep Wanda enthroned as she is, her backside cradled on his pubic bone and legs splayed loosely wide. Glazed eyes assuredly see nothing but waterfalls of living fire, exploding sparks from an Infinity Stone purge of the flesh dancing over her field of vision. Toes curl and flex, calves clinging to the soft corded beams that stipple a crosshatched pattern over perspiring skin.

Systems go: his words hit _something_. What, whether conscious thought or brewing intuitive approach, he might not be certain. Though the slow lift to pull away from him is strained, endorphins loosen her joints as easily as she flips the levers of her harp to adjust the tension upon the strings. A neat twist and the wire goes near slack or practically tugged to breaking. Here, it’s the former she approaches, the supple rounding of shoulders and spine giving room to reach for a better point to plant her hand. Leverage is needed, something to push back against, and the poor man is the best source for a stable, solid platform about. Her hand lands centrally upon his chest and slides up to his shoulder, testing the stability of the position.

Aside from the slant putting momentum fully upon her knees, it’s quite good. Clinging to the gleaming ropework won’t help, and pinning his wrists is too close to get adequate leverage. So he serves for his lover to find her groove, starting by rocking her hips and then sliding laterally across the length of him to find just the right rhythm. When that proves somewhat slower than she might like, there’s no mental process to brainstorm, sift out bad ideas, elaborate on good ones, and test them. Nope, that requires higher capacity. Her hand slides down an inch over his ribs, as though she intends to pin him into the binding matrix.

And bounce, bounce, whimper: the last sound is a high, sharp pitch of an aria as pressure runs right across those dense nerve endings buried about first-and-a-half knuckle deep, the one that causes her to quiver in electric sparks. The damp walls clutching him tighten to the spin of a vise handle, and she eases herself up and down while concentrating just there. Not much for a tempo with a general height of two inches, but it makes the ricochet effect of bottoming out a second later even more impactful, tuned to another of her atonal cries.

Then it’s off to the races, every ounce of energy tipped towards building to a sustainable pace, not quite dead run but a choppy, solid tempo focused heavily on depth and speed. Artistry of a sledgehammer to a Faberge egg applies, and that bows her back, forcing a retreat onto him again, again, and again. No sooner than he collides with the resolute muscle at the top of her passage, he’s all but assaulting it again thanks to the Lampades nymph wildly pursuing her own fractured course. Dark hair snaps around her shoulders, and her flanks glisten with the effort, sweat rolling down the backs of her legs and along her tailbone.

It doesn’t matter to her, only the low burn in her flexed quads and the dull aches somehow sifted through a million impressions from how he fills her, tormenting slightly overstretched muscles to accommodate him, the inherently lascivious orchestra of displaced wetness that builds and reinforces itself, and the red-on-blue-white light searing through every point. Unable to halt the way their rhythm deteriorates or shifts when she flags, or he interrupts, none of it matters beyond stirring up the chaotic spin of impressions to a point even her sensate heart cannot withstand: obliterated in a blink, lengthy to finally summon up a dread time dimmed by lust, it almost hurts more to let go than give out in exhaustion.

Does it say something when her eyes aren’t shut, she’s lost to the amaranthine depths of his gaze? They’re the last thing she sees before the brain ceases to acknowledge the wild vertigo overtaking it, and everything shifts out of sync with the world for a second. Fractions of a second. Long enough that her hasty “Oh _god_ oh gods _oh **god** Stephen godgodgod_ ” becomes an out of body experience; she doesn’t even register her own voice uttering those broken, rapid syllables, much less the crackling descent of lightning and storm wrack through her nervous system.

An arrested band snaps and all the withheld relief comes dropping down on her instantly, an Acme anvil out to flatten her under its enormity. The saving grace, he’s not scratched to ribbons.

What, he’s screwed, you say?

Well, they don’t call it the Little Death for nothing. Twice in one night? He’s flipping Mistress Reaper the bird now.

It is an honor to act as point of leverage for her; as if he has any mind to complain regardless. The moonweb kisses like sparkling champagne at his chakras once more and that same drink feels to inundate his veins until he may as well shine as she does.

The sound of impact is obscenely appropriate as she finds the rhythm meant to destroy herself and all he can do is pray to hold together. Air -- there’s air somewhere here, he needs it, where is it? Planes of muscles stand in ridges and shadows as blistering pleasure burns fuses shorter and shorter still towards the collections of sputtering conflagrations of erogenous zones. She jackhammers hard enough that there’s very little point in forcing his hand, though it doesn’t stop his hips from attempting to follow that split-second retreat -- again, what’s the point? She’s taking the metaphorical whip to his sides and all he can do is buck beneath his rider and blow.

There is a _goddess_ astride him, honestly, what else can he do except choke on his own tongue once more? Whatever confidence he had in retaining some control over this situation is dismantled again. The Sorcerer might not be scratched to ribbons, but fluttering shreds of composure surely drift to the temple floor around them.

She’s -- oh gods, so tight and -- so tight -- hot -- yes, there, he can feel the fluttering around his flesh rev up in speed and potency alike. His fingers are interlaced to white-knuckled force as his chest heaves for air under the branding spread of her palm and he’s trying, desperately trying, to catalogue the vision before him in glistening moon-limned gold and tresses that shift in the wake of her storm like darkest willow branches and _ohhhhh_. Oh, _gods below_ , he’ll never, _ever_ forget the extreme weight of her holding his eyes in that crawling flash-second before she disappears into the hurricane at their hips. Such delicious despair and sumptuous entreaty, an unspoken echo of his earlier pleading for that final shove over into stupefaction and surcease.

His _name_ proves to be the second trigger of this escapade and his own vision goes staticky as the central nervous system hits the Big Red Button. She might register her elbow either bending or locking as his sternum is bowed out in an arc that holds in a quivering stillness.

Beautiful madness swamps him at nearly the same moment she is flattened and another uneven cry to the heavens above and around them signals his near-simultaneous demise.

* * *

 

Dear Lady Death,

_He's mine_.

The Scarlet Witch

* * *

There might even be kisses blown to the grinning rictus face from the central knot of multiverses colliding in a single, unlikely figure who rides the heaving waves for seconds unto eternity. In those rare moments of release from physical torments, Wanda slips loose the bonds of her history and tangible limitations to ghost among the stars. Not even her astral form allows her this level of freedom and oneness to everything, in the space between seconds that stretches out impossibly, when time ceases to exist altogether.

At the precipice of infinity, the only way out is hitting the ceiling, and the only ceiling worth mentioning in the realm is the limit of the dimension. Spine curving as she arches back as far as she can, the witch’s dark hair undulates around her wracked figure, the corset’s valiant efforts to serve as a leather belt the only thing constricting her. Marks from the lacing bite the under swell of her bared chest, the lattice running up the sides of her ribs in a crosshatch fascinating where the indentations cast their own shadows. The lunar gold landscape underneath marches to the roughshod gasps for air to sustain the demise a little longer.

Ancient churchmen pondering life’s mysteries in crabbed handwriting upon scraped hides might blush scarlet to the tips of their ears did they know how these two plumb the unknown nature of the divine, and find the reason for life in one another. They surely would shudder, horrified, in their little stony cells were they at all privy to know how the slightest alteration in the pace sets her higher when he spontaneously drives his hips higher, or retreats too slowly from the succulent depths conforming to him a little too tightly. Could any of those scholars possibly understand how thrilling the satisfactory smack of Strange’s upper thighs into hers is, the tug of her legs wider apart leaving her critically vulnerable and open to whatever happens next?

Damnation never looked so good or felt so sublime.

She abandons any thought of ascent to crash back into the imminent turbulence, sobbing out the fractured syllables of his name again on a keening banshee wail surrendered as her payment to the everlasting eventide. So often the struggle is to _halt_ the release, not prolong it as she does with him, wreaking her havoc by corkscrewing her hips as she rises and falls upon him without the least sense for pacing. Only by grace of limited conquest can they fall in synchronicity with one another, breathing the same breath, afflicted by the same stumbling gallop of a heartbeat, gliding and rubbing against one another as the friction builds upon their interlocked limbs.

She hasn’t the breath to chant _“FIE!”_ in the face of his myriad enemies, much less see anything less than stars, but the telltale rush of white heat flooding through her in galactic spirals answers that one remaining shred of independent volition and quietens the concerns: yes, he _can_ enjoy this, lost to the dregs of an inferno, fully come ablaze in his own time. That mid-rapture she almost stills, and they grind together in the quivering reduction of two willful beings into one diamond-fire duality.

That vision will haunt her, even as conjuring it at the cusp of her own explorations while he wanders through the Loft or takes forever getting dressed -- she’s good at furtive climaxes, all said and done -- can wipe out the slate. For now, this instant of seeing Strange so undone because of her, reduced to the highest apex mentally and the deepest primal state, vaporizes the slate, destroys the mind, and earns a ringing endorsement in the low gasp against his ear when she falls atop him, entwined much as one can be and not at all disengaged.

This is _why_ they struggle. This is why she would face down her forefather a hundred thousand times, in creative death, for a single moment as this wrapped up in her arms. Eventually that poor binding wind snaps, anyways, freed of its sneaky connection around his calves, and sets his legs free. Too late to help, of course.

Never say the Slavic gods don’t have a sense of humour.

Prepared for the snagging of lustful undertow this time around, he manages to stay above the surface. Mostly. Heaving for air as if he’s come up from a deep dive, Strange collapses bonelessly back into the moonweb bower just in time to act as cushion for the slump of the Witch along his body.

All he can do is lie there beneath her as the aftershocks continue within the confines of her molted passage. Seems Buyan itself conspires with her to drain him entirely. A glottal catch escapes his parted lips as the last frisson blazes through his nervous system like spider-lightning, causing him to bow her up a last time in a mildly-pronounced arch before he seems to melt beneath her. He can feel her breath whispering across the base of his neck, along his collarbone, just beneath the scar marks that twinge in a suddenly-remembered delicious pang.

Realizing that his legs are free, he indulges in a stretch from glutes to tarsals before dangling them to drag toes on the temple floor. His bound hands are still trapped beneath her glistening weight, but it’s not an issue. He doesn’t mind. Why would he mind? The world around him is still righting itself and he can feel her heartbeat against his skin. It’s soothing, even if he’s not tired. The Aqua Vitae continues to fight the imminent need to sleep that takes him normally like a wraith in the night.

Lazing beneath her is a bit like swinging in a true hammock, bringing back memories of sultry summer nights. Every inhalation is floral, musky, roses and sandalwood and earthy relief. He sighs out slowly, humming the sound in the back of his throat as he does.

“Gods above, Beloved…” The first words are dry, followed by a whispery laugh; his voice is ragged, but healing quickly. “I will...dream about this for...for…” _Eternity_.

Until next month at moon dark when a small cut crystal glass stands on the head of a guardian lion, or a stretch of rich, deep red ribbon lies over the page of his current tome, or a dusting of three types of petals spills over the pillow in the bedroom.

Then his dreams will walk again in the flesh, perhaps, and the words ‘dark garden’ might cause his vitals to flip and quiver in delightful trepidation. It might be safest to start a bit slower than the norm.

“‘appy Chrissss’m’sss…” The words murmured against his neck are lurid in their state of breathless drunkenness; she didn’t drink the waters of life, only him, and the effects are tangibly rendered in the throat scoured by triumphant cries. “More than dream.”


End file.
